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Wednesday means cake, some coffee and the world
© St. Petersburg Times Tom Shelby sits at the head of the table, his cane beside him, his gavel in mid air. "I've got seniority, and they know it," he says, looking around the room, laughing. What else can you do in the face of the inexorable march of age? Shelby is 95. The other men in the room range from 77 to 91. They are neighbors at Stratford Court in Palm Harbor, a high rise for the elderly. This Wednesday morning is like all the Wednesday mornings for the past decade. Shelby and the others meet to talk about events in the wider world. And I do mean wider. They don't talk even Pinellas County politics. Their interest is in national and international events. Shelby holds up a clipping from the morning paper about the record drop in the Dow. He sounds almost like a schoolteacher when he asks, "Why do you think this has happened?" "Lack of consumer confidence," says Art Chapman. He is a lifelong military man and something of an obsessive about the national debt. "Bottom line is, for me, for the last 15 years, the market has been overvalued," says Ray Gaston, a regular here even though he suffers from congestive heart failure. One of the other men, Gene Schwilck wants to talk about the latest David Broder column from Washington on President Bush. But Schwilck has no takers. Another man, Walter Langway, quotes a line from the famed economist John Maynard Keynes. All this happens over coffee and cake. They are celebrating the 90th birthday of one of their members, Ed Abrams. Ed gives me a business card from years before, when he worked. He has a doctorate in biochemistry. All the men are like this. The man who wanted to talk about President Bush had been a school superintendent. The man who was quoting economic theory had been a college professor. Tom Shelby was an engineer. These get-togethers were his idea as a way to fight the memory losses so common with aging. Last week, the men voted unanimously to oppose the president's much-threatened war on Saddam Hussein. This week, they still want to talk about it. Art Chapman thinks Bush plans a ground war, house to house, in the cities of Iraq. Body counts of the American war dead would hit 30 percent, he says. "The country won't stand for it." "Where's the opposition?" asks Gene Schwilck. "We don't have a good spokesman." Other subjects come up, fleeting. The minimum wage. The wisdom of tax cuts. The cost of prescription drugs. The trade deficit. How the spending habits of younger people affect the economy. All these issues are hanging, and Congress will recess in October and won't return until after the elections are over. "Interesting times we live in," says Tom Shelby. The hour flies. I feel like I've been witnessing a public affairs talk show, but without the celebrities and the shouting. I can't tell who's Republican and who's Democrat. The meetings used to be bigger than this. What now has eight members had as many as 25. At the start, women were included, but the conversations tended to run to who had the most expensive surgery that week, Tom Shelby says. So he set up some rules. They'd talk about politics, it wouldn't get personal and there'd be no women. (They have their own group.) The men's group, called the Men's Forum, has persevered remarkably, but "deaths and move-outs cut into our numbers," Shelby says in the only moment in which he's not upbeat. "So we just stagger along. Maybe next year we won't be here." How I hope he's wrong. I have an impression left over from the morning. It lingers all day. As the men one by one introduced themselves, their voices got noticeably firmer when they said how old they are. They were proud and amazed that they have made it so far. Tom Shelby calls himself one of the lucky ones at 95. His mind works. Every Wednesday he tests it again, to be sure his luck is holding. -- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or (813)-226-3402.
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Times columns today John Romano Mary Jo Melone Tampa Uncuffed From the Times Metro desk |
