Thoughts on Growing Old Gracefully

By Pauline Masson –

I once wrote an essay that said, “I always wanted to grow old gracefully.”

I pictured myself in my seventies and eighties climbing Kilimanjaro, which seasoned mountain climbers say isn’t a real challenge like Everest, but is an easy walk in a good pair of shoes. Or, I would spend my days working in my garden, under a big hat, as Goethe, the German, poet, playwright, and statesman imagined for himself. 

But its not working. I can’t silence the chatter in my brain. Never mind that COVID showed up three years ago.

 Life goes on all around me in a tsunami of worries about artificial intelligence, overly rambunctious elections, and the ever present us-and-them fixation between people who say the most outrageous things in print and those who call for the rest of us to be politiclly correct – what ever that means.

I’m writing about this now because I’ve taken a couple of hits lately because of my age. Not because of my strong opinions, or my accused overuse of superlatives. Instead of saying something is “good,’ I’m apt to say  its ‘spectaular,’

My late friend Barbara Bruns once commented that it was surprising that I had come here and fallen in love with this little town.

But here’s the thing. I do love the mid-America folksy over-the-back-fence (now social media) gossip that frees people to share their gut reaction to everyday events that I have encountered here. 

And I love the tumultuous history of the industrial revolution that steam rolled a hamlet of farmers into millers, road builders, entrepreneurs and hometown politicians.

Clarence Mayle didn’t even know he was a genius when he organized a posse to implore the State Highway Department to bring a new interstate highway, Route 66, through Pacific. He had the first radio in town and insisted his friends listen to it with him. He captivated a local newspaper editor who wrote paeans to the pet squirrel that Mr. Mayle kept in his desk drawer at his First street car dealership. 

And the birds that slept on the electric lines outside the mayor’s gabled house, the editor wrote, never made a chirp in the morning until Mr. Mayle opened his garage door.

I’ve spent a lot of time on both coasts, have been a city reporter in about thirty cities and have made dozens of trips to walk bridges or cemeteries, the true repository of history. And I have never encountered a community anywhere that demonstrates the mutual respect between the races that exists here – and has existed from the get-go.

Make no mistake, there was segregation here. Black kids couldn’t go to a movie at the Royal theater until the 1960s. And my late friend Margaret Hinkle had to take the train to St. Louis each weekday to attend high school, since there was no high school for the ‘colored,’ children here. But she emerged as an activist, who was ever free to speak her mind, who delivered meals on wheels and preserved the history of her Robertsville neighborhood.

I was enthralled with the stories one 90+ year old Black lady told me about her grandfather, a former slave, who was a constant talker that reminded his children and grandchildren that they would be judged by the way they presented themselves. He urged them to copy the enunciation of their white neighbors and when in public dress like they were going to church. When I came here 100 years after her grandfather the members of her huge family were all great talkers and good dressers.

Maybe it was my own Irish genes that were captured by the romance of St. Patrick’s Old Rock Church in Catawissa, the former parish church that continued to boast a huge following 65 years after it was relegated to the status of mission. More likely, though, it was the story-telling genius of the late Billy Murphy, a raconteur of local renown who lured descendants of former parishioners and the community at large to keep what Billy called, “that old church,” active by keeping the stories of what happened at St Patrick’s alive.

Like the mutual regard of the races here, there is nothing like the phenomena of St. Patrick’s anywhere.

So I revel in Pacific’s uniqueness. 

And, yes, along with all the accolades, I’ve followed the journalists’ mandate to call out the elected and appointed officials who used the power of their office to reward their friends and punish their enemies.

I have to tell you . . . This is not an apology, a confesstion or a New Year’s resolution. It is just an acknowledgement that I am not, in my own self-efacing way, weakening in my reaction (or over-reaction as some critics claim) to the world around me.

To all those critics who have encouraged me to retire because I dared write about something their friends did that they would prefer not to see in print, I leave you with this year-end thought. Thanks for reading my stuff. And don’t put away your combat boots just yet.

Growing older, and long COVID,  have put a crimp in my walk, but so far have not quieted the constnt symphony of life that plays in my subsconscious. I think I’m still good for 2025.

Maybe in a year or two, I’ll be more mellow. But I hope not.