One of the joys of retirement, in addition to sleeping in, is having time and energy for our friends. As during youth, we find that pain shared is pain reduced, while joy shared is joy enhanced. Yet during the big clump of our middle years, while career and parenthood were making their toughest demands on us, we gave our friends short, if any, shrift.

Part of our latter-day talk with friends covers health. ("If an elder wakes up in the morning and something doesn't hurt, it means he died in the night.") 
Seriously, though, because 21st-century doctors and nurses are so hurried and harried, the informal patient network has become an essential form of health insurance.

When we shout in regard to a friend's symptom, "Don't just sit there; do something," we may be saving a life - or, at the least, improving its quality.
But our elder talk also ranges far beyond the health of the individual. Recently I traveled more than an hour to have lunch with Dr. Marjorie Lewisohn, a friend I have never not known. We spoke with enthusiasm for three hours. Only on my homebound bus did I realize that neither of us had said a word about ourselves.
True, we are both lucky to have landed on one of the blessed plateaus that modern science has made available to the lucky elders (she is recovering from a stroke, and I from a feet-first visit to the E.R.). On these plateaus, elders are relatively pain-free and able to adapt at their own pace to the loss of activities they used to think were essential to their happiness but now discover are not so at all.

What Marjorie and I talked mostly about were other people, including our parents who were younger than we are now when they died. Though at school she and I used to compete fiercely, the only competitive moment in our conversation concerned whose father had the worst table manners, hers or mine. She claimed hers did; I disagreed.

We ranged over not only our own years - she is 85; I'll be 85 in June - but also the lives of our parents and grandparents, thus encompassing a century and a half. We saluted our predecessors for having survived such illnesses as quinsy sore throat (probably the form of strep that killed George Washington) and dropsy (a swelling of body tissues now controlled by diuretics), and enduring such limitations of freedom as stiff collars for men, whalebone corsets for women, lack of reliable birth control for both, and for brides at least, an almost total ignorance about sex.

"Don't let him see how much you hate it," was the only advice given to my mother on her wedding day by her mother.

When my friend and I were young and not very interesting, we spent virtually full time thinking and talking about ourselves (how we looked, how we should act, how we came across to people). Now that we are old and far more interesting, we are likely, unless ill or in pain, not to think about ourselves at all.
Why should we care what the people we meet think of us? Why should we bother to compete? True, a few of us still have ambitions, but if we fail at these, it doesn't shatter us the way it used to; having finally established ourselves as persons, our personhood is no longer vulnerable to ordinary outer frustrations.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, even before he was old, wrote that it was the needs of other people that beguile us from the "prison house of self-concern." That prison house opens its doors outward for many retirees who are well enough to be able to care deeply about their fellows. 

My friend breached many a barrier for women when she became a doctor (in the 1930's a girl had to choose between a full-time career and marriage). 
Although Marjorie has no children, she is an intimate friend of many of her nieces and nephews, and was full of curiosity about my 10 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, with two more on the way. I, of course, was equally curious about her younger relatives.

Among our kin many soap opera situations occur. In fact, the ability to spot such patterns is one of the satisfactions of age.

While the fastest-growing segment of the American populace is that of people over 85, my friend and I are well aware, as we say goodbye, that we may never meet again. At any moment one or both of us might fall off the plateau. 
Still, through the years we've developed enough confidence in ourselves and our supportive team to hope that we can handle whatever comes next. After all, we've already coped with bereavements and other heartbreaks. 

For the present, therefore, we figuratively swing hands with each other and, with the free hand, thumb our noses at the Grim Reaper.