Composing a Further Life

contributing to his alma mater and to continue to do so; it is something different if they have absorbed the idea that education is important and they contribute to the institution that seems to need their support in the present to improve quality or access. I grew up hearing about the “poor starving Europeans” at the end of World War II, but the principle involved is that no one should starve, and that may involve giving to relieve famine areas in Africa or Asia. Ted’s concern with birds might involve struggling against climate change in the twenty-first century. Or one of his children might carry his concern for black education into a concern for children with disabilities. The example that he sets, of commitment, is important, but in order to be followed, his commitment has to be translated to the needs of a new era. This is why Ted’s recognition that what his daughters do is “worthy” makes sense, even though it leaves him concerned about what to do with his own ongoing work.
    Ted returned to the meaning for him of having served in World War II. “Many men my age have nothing to look back on that makes them a good person except maybe that they went to war. Like manning a Navy ship when I was eighteen years old—just totally incompetent, but you grew up fast. Then to have to go back to Amherst and wear little beanie hats and fraternity rushing, so absurd! You know, after you’d seen people die, seen people lose their heads because of a big gun that backfired … If you’re interviewing older men who were in World War II, the war experience would be very important for you. They’re all my age, eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-five, dying like flies. Read the obituary pages. I think it’s important to know their attitudes towards war and whether war is for them a proud memory of having done something important.”
    “Do you think that the kids that are in Iraq now are having that same experience?” I asked him.
    “I don’t think so, because I’m sure most of them hate the war. They think the war was a fraud. The other war was quite different. When Pearl Harbor came, no one,
no one
, thought of running to Canada.”
    “It was the ‘good war,’ ” I said.
    “I tell my children, Why don’t you write me a note on VJ Day and say, Thanks, Dad? You know they don’t. A lot of men have no legacy but having protected the lives of future children. Most men hate their jobs, a lot of them don’t like their wives, have no respect for their children. All they have is the war, only the memories, the glories. I think if you talk to older men, the war is a very important thing. To have fought in World War II, that is a helluva thing to bring your children, even though you feel the evils of war.”
    Ted Cross was the only person I interviewed for this project who had seen active service in World War II, because my primary focus was on the choices that individuals make as they enter Adulthood II, which for Ted seems to have coincided with the founding of his journal fifteen years before. Ted used this period of life to create an organization for which he now needs to consider succession plans, just as Jim Morton has had to think ahead to a successor to lead the New York Interfaith Center, which he established when he retired in 1997. Ted died while this book was in final preparation.
    For those who are a decade or more younger than Ted, “the war” is the Vietnam war, which has left very different memories. Jane Fonda was just over thirty and an established film star when she met her second husband, Tom Hayden, who was already deeply involved in protesting the war. She had been living in France with her first husband, Roger Vadim, and returned in the late sixties to an America in which the activism of the civil rights movement was being displaced by the anti–Vietnam war movement, with the feminist movement developing alongside. “What happened, which is part of my DNA now, was the realization of the collective power of people working together,” she told me. “I was a rugged individualist, I had no friends, women were rivals. I was not relational. It was my second act that coincided with the end of the sixties and into the seventies, when the women’s movement needed women activists, and suddenly—it was like getting into a warm bath—’only together will we make a difference,’ ‘we want to make a difference, but we can’t do it individually.’ The other thing that is still with me is