Composing a Further Life

was tremendously impressive … and oppressive … from the point of view of the child. But you felt absolutely safe. You knew what the deviations were, and you knew what the consequences were.”
    I commented that, by the time most people had television, that kind of awareness had decreased. People began to sit indoors, and front porches all over the country were abandoned—no more “Good morning, Mr. George,” no “Good afternoon, Miss Mamie” as you walked down the street. Neighborhoods became less safe, and again less safe when families began to get air-conditioning and close their windows in hot weather. I have sometimes fantasized that older people who have become shut-ins might be enrolled in a program to watch the streets through their windows.
    “But even so,” Ruth said, “when I was in college and driving, my father said to me, ‘You should stop driving so fast.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Don’t you know that the police tell me where you go and how fast you’re going?’ Okay, so that was ’fifty-nine, ’sixty, still a small town. Still small enough for most people to know what you were doing, and if they cared enough, it got reported back. It was, in that sense, a very closed society.
    “I think that’s part of why I couldn’t wait to graduate college. I went to college where my parents had gone, and then I went straight to New York. Because I thought not only ‘big city,’ exciting, et cetera, but ‘Ooh, wouldn’t it be good to get away from all this?’ ”
    Ruth majored in psychology and studied social work in graduate school. While she was away, urban renewal came to Baton Rouge, and her grandparents’ home fell victim to development. “When they were in their early seventies and I was nineteen,” she said, “their little neighborhood and their house all fell to eminent domain. They were retired by that time. My grandfather had had a heart condition for a very long time, but he was functioning pretty well. My grandmother, I guess she lived another year and died. So they died at seventy-four, seventy-five.”
    “Not a good age to leave their home and have everything get jumbled up,” I said, remembering that often when older people are forced into a move too late for them to adapt to the new place, their lives seem to be cut short. “It did them in?”
    “It did.”
    “So then, in New York, did you feel like a country mouse in the big city?”
    “I didn’t, you know. I didn’t stop to think about it. I was so busy doing things. I went to work right away for the City Department of Welfare. I worked in what they called foster care for older people, for adults. It was not what I wanted to do, not what I saw myself doing. However, it was just fascinating that—you know, things all come back in circles in their own fashion, and here we are thinking about growing old. I spent a year and a half finding board and care homes for elderly New Yorkers who were either receiving public assistance or the city was putting money into providing board and care for them. Or they could have been private folks who just needed referrals.”
    “That’s a model that doesn’t exist any longer, does it?” I asked. “I’ve never heard anybody talk about foster care for seniors. It makes sense.”
    “It does, but maybe in smaller places. In New York, this was a small unit, but it clearly was responsive to some of the people, like older men who lived in single rooms, SROs they call them now, and were in dire straits, so we would try to make sure that they were safe and well cared for and got what they needed to survive. It was a great way to learn the city. I rode the subways all over town, got to see stuff that I had never thought I’d see. Got to do a little bit of counseling, although that wasn’t really the point. The point was really to get these people in the right place and to maintain them in the right place.” Ruth’s move to New York, followed by her later moves, suggested to me the fairy tales in which a young hero—rarely a heroine—goes out into the world in search of adventure.
    “I’ll tell you,” she went on, “one of the things that it did was to explode my sense of what the universe was. Here I was, having lived in a very segregated environment for twenty-one years. I knew who white people were, I knew who Jews were, but they weren’t a part of my everyday experience in the same way as they were when I went to New York. So I got a sense of