The great triumph is to be alive.

Age? Well, that’s another thing. As Joni Mitchell intones, ‘something’s lost, but something’s gained, in living every day’. She recorded ‘Both Sides, Now’ once when she was 26, and once when 57, giving life to the sound of ageing.

Yes. Each season brings its joy and worry.

Becoming older often comes with flourishing wisdom, experience, even-handedness, even shrewdness.

But it also can lead to tangled wires, through which one loses one’s own tune. The character of ‘Old Salieri’, in Schafer’s Amadeus, considered Mozart’s music as the song of eternal youth. “Displace one note and there would be diminishment”, he muses, chair-bound in an asylum.

‘Diminishment’ is, indeed, the great worry of growing older.

***

I did not have the privilege of knowing my grandparents. They were in the grave before I was five. My encounters with elderly people left their mark as I grew up, because they were written on a blank slate.

I recall Teasie, a retired older friend of my aunts, who used to come to family parties. Teasie was joyful, warm, and full of light. She gave me attention and care. But she unaccountably drifted from view.

Then there was Nan Gallagher, a retired teacher and musician. Nan was distinguished for coping with the death of her husband, and they with a heap of young children. She pushed on, kept working, got them through college. Now, there she was, retired, playing piano with a neat whisky perched on the top-board.

Being afraid of death and its associates, I warmed more to Teasie. I regret, now, not knowing what became of her.

My most memorable encounter with older people came during the summer I turned 21. That is the period when I worked in a Jewish Nursing Home, in Manhattan.

My intended summer job was that of floor cleaner. But on the second day, over lunch, I chatted to a dignified lady who ran ‘Activities Therapy’ on the 17th Floor. Jane, a woman whose New York twang belied her Irish fealty, had a team of therapists, nurses and orderlies running concerts, wheelchair dances, discussion groups, oil painting and other crafts  – all from DeWitt Nursing Home’s top floor. I mentioned that I played piano. The next day, I became a paid player-of-songs from The American Songbook, a wheelchair dancer, and a facilitator of discussions between 75-90 year olds.

Those months on the Upper East Side showed me the breadth of life accorded to us, as we age. The facilitated chats were my favourite – small circles of wheelchairs holding people of my grandparents’ ages. I developed bonds with some razor-sharp men and women who described living through the Depression, going to war, and working on Wall Street in 1929. Others contributed in a more fitful manner, akin to the polar bear who traverses ice floats as the sun rises.

Acuity was the invisible separator on the 17th Floor.

Many residents had drifted from clarity. One sang ‘Take me out to the ball game’ over and over. Some fell silent. Some spoke in a disjointed manner, frustrated that they were failing to make sense.

And all of those who could, would protest that all was well.

Our final fairytale is the fantasy of good health.

*****

Coverage of President Biden’s cognition has been a theme of the 2024 American elections. Presidential performances have been keenly managed, avoiding moments of spontaneity when possible.

In 2022, signs surfaced that his gaffes were more than gaffes. Biden publicly called out for Jackie Walorski during a White House Congress on Food.

“Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?”

The congresswoman had died in a crash the month previous, at which time he had publicly mourned her passing.

But his live debate with Trump, in June 2024, blew all this wide open.

Joe Biden was demonstrably confused, at times non-verbal and at times lost. Donald Trump, wily as ever, knew the camera would do the work. His ‘Sleepy Joe’ moniker was coming fully to life upon the debate stage, hinting at what Dylan Thomas called ‘the dying of the light’.

Most of the commentary afterwords railed about Uncle Joe’s age. At 81, the man was too old to run again, and too old to be President. Age was a euphemism; they meant cognition.

Neither critics nor haters should be given free rein to diagnose a man. This should be led by himself, his family and associates, and his doc. And yet, POTUS is a case apart. At stake is the welfare of his country.

***

Exactly what happened in the aftermath of that calamitous live debate will emerge, over time.

It seems clear that Biden was unceremoniously booted from running for a second term, suggesting cloaked cabal beyond the President. It seems likely that Biden, with a rage characteristic of frontotemporal dementia, fully revolted. In immediately endorsing his own Vice President as the new candidate, he precluded any prospect of a compressed primary race.

This was perceived as an act of sabotage by the Democratic Honchos, and Nancy Pelosi has already hinted so.

In anointing Harris as the new Democratic candidate, the ousted Biden won the prospect of double schadenfreude: depriving The Democratic Cabal of the joy of nominating their preferred candidate, and witnessing a weak and untested candidate utterly implode at the polls.

By this measure, two winners emerged on November 5th 2024.

‘Diminishment’, it seems, is a continuum.