Less People, Less Landscaping -- 2015
I began writing a small newspaper column for a local paper 20 years ago, and that feels like enough. My last one publishes this week, so I thought for the next few weeks I might post some from the archives, random drop-ins on 20 years.
Bernice Madigan died on January 3, her passing making just a ripple in the news cycle, easy to miss. There were football games, and so on.
She had been living on a farm in western Massachusetts for the past few years with family, although she’d left home at 18 for our nation’s capitol and stayed there most of her life, happily married and working for the Treasury Department until she took an early retirement due to a disability.
Retirement is an uneasy concept for me. Ask me again in 10 years; I might be less uneasy then (possibly terrified), but as I watch friends and family drift off into this chapter I worry. So many people seem to lose their spark.
Not Bernice Madigan, though, known as Bennie to most. In fact, Bennie seemed pretty sparky to me, staying active and interested in the world, and even wandering into social media a bit. She had 600 Facebook friends and nearly 25,000 followers on Twitter, even though she wasn’t particularly active, just dipping her retired toes in the water a bit. She seemed to thrive in retirement, making me wonder if the folks at AARP knew about her. She appeared to enjoy it, always a good thing and a better thing for Bennie, considering that she left the work force 75 years ago.
This is the reason for the ripple. At the time of her death, Bernice Madigan was nearly exactly 115-1/2 years old, a supercentenarian and then some. She had been the fifth-oldest person on the planet, and one of only six people still alive who were born in the 19th century. And then there were five.
Of those six survivors of the late 1800s, by the way, four were Americans (now three), which might come as a surprise. We’re used to attributing longevity to something else, to simpler lifestyles, to a healthier, more natural way of living, not something usually recognized as an American way of life, but living into your 12th decade is an elite status and there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason that anyone can pinpoint (I can assure you that “supercentenarian” is hard to rhyme. I tried for a while).
Genetics, certainly. Attitude, almost definitely. It helps to be female (out of the 63 documented supercentenarians, 61 are women). Otherwise, it appears to be luck and an approach to life that looks forward, not in that other direction.
But that other direction is so tempting.
I would have enjoyed talking with Bennie, I think. She came to Washington, D.C. nearly a century ago, answering the call of President Wilson for young women to assist in the war effort by working in government. She attended the inauguration of Warren Harding. Born during the McKinley administration, she seemed to be interested in history and government, and she lived in our capitol for nearly 90 years. I suspect she had good stories to tell about that, and other things.
Even now, as we slide into a new calendar and look ahead, we can recognize that the future is always hiding in the past. This is the year, after all, that Marty McFly time traveled to in “Back to the Future II,” a late-80s exercise in bad forecasting but still fun to think about. It seemed so far away, back then, and yet here we are. Not a hoverboard or flying car in sight.
Bernice Madigan posted to Twitter a picture she’d taken in 1920 of the Lincoln Memorial. “Looked different then,” she said. “Less landscaping. Less people.”
That feels about right. There was less. This woman lived two of my lifetimes plus a few more years, but I’ve still been around a while and there’s just more of everything except money and time. More people. More noise. More congestion. More landscaping.
But also more choices, which seems like it should be a good thing and probably is. Still, I wonder what gets lost in the multiple ways we have to divert ourselves, fill up our hours and pass away our years. Mark Twain? Carole Lombard? Radar O’Reilly?
I saw a picture of Jim Croce the other day, the polar opposite of Ms. Madigan, a rising singer/songwriter who died in 1973 at the age of 30 in a plane crash. I thought about his song, “Operator,” and how incomprehensible its lyrics must seem to even kids in high school now. Why does he need help making a phone call? What’s an operator?
The last veteran of the World War I, the war that led Bernice Madigan to Washington, died three years ago. The Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk 112 years ago. The first movies were made before Madigan was born, mass production of automobiles a year after (the car is much older than you think). The past is sometimes eerily preserved on film, allowing us to imagine, but the people are long gone, and their stories with them.
So I celebrate the life of Bernice Madigan, 115 years young, a thoroughly modern woman, whose living memories of another time have now left us.
And I mourn it, a little, as exceptional and rare as it was. She will be missed by her friends and family, of course, but now also by me, and maybe you.
And yes, I know. It should be “fewer” people, not less. I never correct or worry about grammar other than my own, though. Life’s just too short.
