An Interview With Mark Gerzon
The phrase “growing old” suggests the only thing going on during aging is the passage of time and the deterioration of the body. I think something else is happening, however. I believe that, as we enter the second half of life, the side of ourselves that is neglected asserts itself more powerfully; I call that wholeness.
I had come to the Omega Institute, an adult summer learning center in the Hudson River Valley, on a lark, intrigued by a catalog description for a workshop that promised to integrate baseball with yoga, meditation, and martial arts.
The activity center at my parents’ Florida condo was a low, T-shaped building with sliding glass doors that opened onto room after well-lit room. Signs on these doors read, Bingo, Pottery, Woodworking.
When the door has been slammed behind him for the first time, the prisoner stands in the middle of the cell and looks round. I fancy that everyone must behave in more or less the same way.
It’s August 1995, and Billy says the Mick is as good as dead. My brother counts one, two, three on his fingers: “First they give him a new liver. Then the cancer they missed eats up his lung. Then he dies.”
They had to wait a long time for the harvest to begin. Gerard talked to Kate of nothing else for weeks. He imagined the two of them working their way across Canada, then down the West Coast of the U.S., picking fruit and living like gypsies.
Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places . . . live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.
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