Jon Kay’s compelling new book, The Expressive Lives of Elders sets out to formalize a “folkloristic gerontology.” Building on earlier work by developmental psychologist Erik Erikson on the stages of life; psychiatrist Robert Butler’s on life review; anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days; and folklorists Mary Hufford, Marjorie Hunt, and Steve Zeitlin’s The Grand Generation: Memory, Mastery and Legacy with an introduction by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Kay’s volume goes further by offering “’folkloristic gerontology’ as a subfield in aging studies that marshals the theories, methods and practices of folklore of the research of and service to older adults.” For his book, he selected ten essays by prominent scholars who work in folklore and aging. Each of the essays offers a perspective on what the field of folkloristic gerontology might encompass.
At the same time, the essays illustrate how much each of the distinctive elders chronicled in this volume have to teach the public—all of us—about the art of living. Each of the writers in Kay’s book are collaborating with elders to help frame and disseminate the work of these older adults in creative ways—a central role for all of us in folklore.
For instance, Lisa Higgins, Director of the Missouri Folklife Program, focuses on western bootmaker, Joseph Patrickus Jr., born and raised in Chicago, who picked up on an older family trade after a career as an engineer, becoming a master bootmaker in a small shop at the crossroads of Missouri highway 14 and highway 5 in the small town of Camdenton in Missouri. She writes about Patrickus’s concept not of a bucket but a basket list—a “metaphor for the improvisations he must make when a goal becomes unattainable. ‘My basket doesn’t hold everything. Sometimes things slip through.’”
In their essay, “Quilts and Aging,” Clare Luz and Marsha MacDowell write about another newly created tradition of tremendous public interest:
"There are elders who clearly have mortality in mind when they make a quilt, in anticipation of their own death as well as that of others. The director of nursing in a nursing home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, tells the story of a resident one day asking why it is that the new residents come in through the front door while those who die are taken out the back door, without any acknowledgment of ceremony. The resident shared the difficulty of not knowing what has happened to someone and not being able to mark the passing or honor the person’s life in a dignified manner. The nurse agreed and advocated for a change in policy; people who died would be taken out the front door and the resident and staff would have the opportunity to recognize their life. An idea developed to make quilts to cover the person as they left the facility. Over time, these quilts, many made by the residents themselves, became more personalized, and eventually residents began making quilts for themselves in anticipation of their own death, using familiar fabrics and favorite colors. The story speaks of the power of a simple quilt to humanize an otherwise sterile, impersonal procedure. This practice of using what are sometimes called “dignity quilts” is appearing more often across the country."
Most of the essays in this volume focus on the stories of exemplary elders. Selina Morales, Director of the Philadelphia Folklore Project, writes about her grandmother, Jerusalén Morales, a Puerto Rican espiritista healer whom she interviewed across four decades. She remembers sitting with her grandmother as a little girl and wrapping individual pennies into a red cloth and tying them up with a white ribbon to transform them into “lucky pennies” that could, in turn, be sold for a dollar. Jerusalén Morales speaks about the botanica she opened in the Bronx as a “pharmacy for the soul.” She goes on to talk about the grace of a healer, “a spirit goes through the hands of the healer to make a moment so beautiful, like when you light a match you light that person’s life. That is how you know you have the power to heal.”
“At ninety-three, José Lugo Arroyo is many things,” writes Julián Antonio Carrillo, doctoral candidate in anthropology at Indiana University. He is “a woodcarver, painter, poet, chronicler, and novelist, as well as retired soldier, teacher, mathematician, and university administrator.” He is also a jíbaro, a small farmer from Puerto Rico from near the town of Quebradilla. Carillo adds that he is also an “ethnographic fieldworker,” witnessed by the 98 woodcarvings of his childhood in Puerto Rico. “This subprocess of carving helped him, I argue, make sense of his ‘new’ environment and ultimately adapt to it. That is, through the production of figurines, don José was actively trying to make sense of the changes around him. . . he was ‘carving a niche’ for himself.”
Patricia Atkinson, Folk Arts Director at the Nevada Arts Council, echoes a similar theme. She writes “Elders are metaphorically drowning in a sea of negative images about aging. . .. For people who have suffered a loss of tradition, language, or community, a return to the familiarity of traditional lifeways helps to create or restore balance in lives marked by chaos.” She goes on to write about the elders who have participated in her apprenticeships programs, among them, Hilman Tobey. Tobey was born to the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe in 1915, retired from carpentry in 1980, and in his 36 years of retirement crafted and taught students about ceremonial pipes.
In her essay, “I Don’t Have Time To Be Bored,” Yvonne Lockwood, Curator Emerita at the Michigan State University Museum, adds another exemplary elder to the discussion, chronicling the life of Anna Lassila, a Finnish master rag rug weaver from Michigan. She writes that in her eighties Lassila “had a more acute awareness of her skills and accomplishments and their role in Finnish America.”
The last two chapters in the book treat Folklife and Creative Aging programs. Kathleen Mundell, Director of the Elderhood Arts Program at Cultural Resources in Rochport, Maine, notes that “definitions of what is ‘creativity’ with its emphasis on ‘fine art’ and its push toward professional teaching artists delivering art instruction to older adults remains narrowly defined.” Folk Arts in aging programs, she suggests highlight the importance of “helping people reach within themselves to fine meaning and connection.”
Troyd Geist, State Folklorist at the North Dakota Council on the Arts, takes this argument further with “The Power of Folk Arts in Creative Aging, Health and Wellness.” He details the important quantitative studies in this area, including evaluations conducted by his aging and wellness program. His program asked elders to rate their feelings on the three “plagues” of loneliness, boredom, and helplessness, rating them on a scale from 1 to 100 in a survey the elders took both before and after their workshop. For some assessment questions, the needle moved as much as 36.4 percent for the better. “Traditional art,” he writes, “is powerful with regard to wellness, especially when it is thoughtfully, creatively and practically engaged…. Thus folklorists who are knowledgeable and trained in understanding the complexities of traditions, folk arts, and cultural context within the lives of people hold an important, perhaps critical place in the world of potent creative aging and health programming.”
The exemplary elders in each of these well-crafted essays, along with their deeply rooted and community-based art forms, enable Kay to make the case for a field of “folkloristic gerontology.” The field’s collective work with these model individuals lies at the heart of the profession, but it belies some limitations as well. Nobody would deny that a person in their eighties or nineties who is carving scenes of their childhood or quilting is doing something that is good for them. The world doesn’t need folklorists to tell them that. Folklorists need to think beyond the obvious benefits of elder arts, and perhaps beyond exemplary individuals and what they have accomplished. They also need to find ways to acknowledge and incorporate into the field the ways in which elderhood arts include other art forms including, painting, creative writing, poetry, group singing, and more, that often fall outside the rubric of traditional arts but are valuable to their practitioners nonetheless.
Two of the essays in Kay’s book stand out for the ways in which they expand the thinking for this new field. Danille Elise Christensen, Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, writes about “Performing Productivity through Gardening and Home Canning.” Whereas folklorists tend to focus on exemplary individuals who have both aged especially well and have remarkable talents, this essay extends the sense of creativity and aging to the far more common practices of canning and gardening—watching things grow.
Her essay covers home food production as an antidote to the isolation, poverty, and dependence that often come with aging, especially in rural areas. “Social ecologies that support home food production and preservation,” she writes, “can have multiple benefits. These practices maintain interpersonal networks of labor and exchange, demonstrate personal expertise and aesthetic taste, stimulate mental and physical activity, and offer material proof of continued productivity and relevance.”
In her essay, “Curating Time’s Body,” Mary Hufford, Director of Arts and Humanities for the Livelihood Knowledge Exchange Network, recalls writing The Grand Generation in 1997, only to discover a bit later that her mother Barbara Hufford had begun carving scenes of family life using natural materials like long-needle pine from her backyard in Richmond, Virginia. She was now the daughter of a folk artist! “I see in my mother’s carving and in my fieldwork with communities in the Appalachian coalfields the work of elders in weaving larger ecological cycles together with biographic cycles.” She expands the notion of what Julián Antonio Carrillo aptly calls the “mobilization of memory,” echoed throughout the book to explore memories embodied in materials from the natural world that expand and extend their meanings beyond one person’s memory to the cycles of nature. She calls the practice “tending the flesh of sensibility,” seeding collective sensibility by depositing memories in the materials of the world. She looks at “systems that are at once cultural and ecological. . . in the complex collaborations of elders, children, and nature that curate time’s body.”
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[Review length: 1705 words • Review posted on March 28, 2019]