Slim Novel 15 - http://adventuresofkimi.blogspot.com - See Homepage
9. A Walk to Remember
Early autumn in the Bronx, Sunday, noon: Eddie meets Nina outside the Medical School building.
"Shall we dance or walk?" Nina quips, alluding to a Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers late 1930's Hollywood movie she loves.
"Apropos the seminar at 1 PM, we walk for our one-million hour lives," says Eddie, more voluble than usual because of the good weather and surrounding smells & sounds. First, the bright sight of Nina in light blue dress from shoulders to knees and showing nicely rounded legs and pretty feet seen through low-heel, strapless white shoes good for walking. Her face is unmade up. To him it is a standing in the sun face that evokes a that's for me. Nina's breastworks are not crudely stacked, they are smoothly blended to her shape. Best of all, her face: open to friendship, lively and - Jeepers! - where'd she get those peepers? he thinks, every time he looks into her eyes.
"Well, what are we standing here looking at?" she exclaims. "The sun is making me perspire!"
They set off fast. Eddie estimates they are doing 5 miles an hour and should arrive at Seminar in the Sociology conference room of Hunter College on time. He takes in a smell of afternoon autumn - burning leaves that will pleasurably excite his consciousness in future and prevent depressive feeling. Why? Because it will be associated with walking next to Nina. And the light breeze that ruffles her smooth ash-blonde hair but never unsmooths it. Nina's neat! Eddie thinks with pleasure.
The route takes them north to Pelham Parkway, lined by trees, many with ripe red crab apples along the green walkway and with benches full of oldsters from nearby apartment houses. They walk west to White Plains Road elevated subway where the Parkway becomes the east end of Fordham Road.
Fifteen minutes from where they started and on the north side of the street across from the Bronx Zoo, they make a right turn on the corner at the southeast edge of the famous Bronx Botanical Garden, walk along its western high metal fenced border, and, glancing to left, see the cream color Gothic Buildings of the Jesuit Fordham University across a wide street. The fragrance of flowers and the autumn leaves pleasure Eddie. Soon they are at Bedford Park Boulevard and they make a left and walk up a bridge over the railroad that carries commuters north from Grand Central Station on the east side 42nd Street in Manhattan and back to east side Manhattan, and the two continue up the sloping Bedford Park Boulevard sidewalk and then across the Grand Concourse and down and cross under the Elevated train tracks at Jerome Ave.
Eddie notes they are not even a little short of breath. He feels a quiet happiness, being at the start of something very good in his life.
10. Seminar
The gang's all here at Seminar around the long, oval, brown mahogany table. And Nina is a surprise. Eddie's got a girl, is a thought followed by And what a looker!
At far end, facing the door where Eddie & Nina entered is Professor Edwardes in dark brown suit, his Tom Dewey mustache trimmed. Seated on his right around the oval curve of the table is a young speed-writing help, a 15-year-old boy in white shirt and tie over neat tan pants, recommended from Bronx High School of Science; next, Dr Stan Pelc, an important reason Eddie brings Nina with him today; next, down from Stan, is Sister Barbara in her black nun's garb and next to her in usual spaghetti-sauce-stained, white work garb is Nicola of Luigi's Pasta/Pizza always ready to give opinion in his Italian accent. Across from them on Edwardes' left are the light-skin super's helper Sam and beside him his very dark skin companion Xenia Green and beside her, fresh out of medical school a new Intern from Montefiore Hospital, Dr Henry, there at Dr Stan's urging.
A minute or so later comes the famed neurosurgeon, Leo Davidoff, with his inevitable secretary Missy Prissy. They sit together at the opposite end of table from Professor Edwardes.
Eddie and Nina sit by Dr. Stan.
Edwardes begins: "Today, Seminar's title is One Million Hours of Life? and if you have a calculator's mind it works out to circa one hundred and fourteen years, which humans reach and breach only very rarely.
OK. This is Seminar. Questions, please!"
Nicola raises right hand. "Already gotta too many people! And liva a hundred fourteen year? Too mucha old! Too many problema even you docs here!"
"Good opener Mr Nicola," says Edwardes, who actually had asked Nicola to open with that. He glances a little worriedly at Sister Barbara halfway down the table on his left. "Even with the recent war, we still have an overpopulation worse than the Reverend Malthus ever envisioned. But the question of One-Million Years of a life expectancy is experimental. Supposing we could produce a life expectancy of one hundred and fourteen years in which the oldest could be as mentally and physically intact as at age thirty? Imagine such a society? A human mind that functions at peak up to fourteen years past age one hundred compared to today when most minds are gone by age seventy! My guess is it could produce what today we consider miracles. Imagine if Einstein could still be theorizing at age one hundred as well as he did at thirty - we'd have a theory of everything! Or if the great Walden Pond Thoreau could be writing brilliantly past one hundred instead of having to die in his forties - a revolution in civil behavior! I am talking about a pathfinder experiment by a university where we keep select persons - professors .." he stops to chuckle - "like me alive and functioning maximally to at least age one hundred and fourteen."
Nicola interrupts, "Yeah! Yeah! And donna forgetta my Italia compatriot Galilei. Iffa he liva hundred, we be onna Moon and Mars now! Anda Tesla too!"
Professor Edwards turns to Eddie "Now I want our medical student here, my former assistant Edward, to tell us of some research he completed."
Eddie gets up and tells his experience in the dissecting room with the stiff, or as he calls it here the corpse, that had the clean arteries but an alcoholic-shot liver; then of the resulting experiments with the rats that showed the importance of diet in preventing disease of the arteries. Then he explains that the old age conditions are caused by the clogging of the arteries due to aging.
At the end of his telling, Sam interrupts "You suggesting, doc, all we gotta do is eat the right stuff, drink the right amount a hooch, and we can live past a hunnerd like we ain't no more'n forty?"
Professor Edwardes answers: "In a word, Mr Sam, Yes. But it is not so simple or we would not be having this Seminar. People today, as people always, like to eat and drink and enjoy forbidden things, and if they are told the fact that much of what they are enjoying is killing them slowly they will give you an attitude classically expressed as Devil take the hindmost, which I crudely translate as Up your ass!"
A general chuckle goes around the room.
Dr Stan raises his hand. "Before anything, we need to experiment as Eddie here did. His work is a beginning - with rats and demonstrating a specific effect. But, assuming the hypothesis proves out, it has to be decided how to proceed. Should the knowledge be offered to everyone? What might be the bad effects of a whole population of billions on this planet living past one hundred?"
Leo Davidoff raises a hand. "The social effects of medical judgments are too often ignored so I commend your question. Even a brief consideration of expanding life expectancy from the present's to more than a century suggests a near doubling of world population. And almost all of them will not be Einsteins, Thoreaus, Galileos or Teslas."
Xenia Green diffidently raises a hand. "Excuse me, you docs, but I am a dope when it comes to medical science. What exactly is the hypothesis? And how can me and my man here" - she gestures toward Sam - "start doing what will keep us young like we are now up till age one hundred and fourteen? I mean what exactly do we do?"
Professor Edwardes nods to Eddie, who, a little embarrassed because he does not speak well in public, gets up and, surprising himself and gratifying everyone, briefly, concisely explains the hypothesis, to wit, That aging with its bad effects on body and mind is mostly caused by over-eating shown by weighing too much for one's height, and by eating too many fat and sweet foods. That this can be monitored by blood tests of the fatty substances. And by eating in a way that one loses weight down to below what the average American today weighs for height and by keeping blood tests for fats below a crucial level based on healthy eating, one should be able, with luck in avoiding accidents and cancer, to live to one hundred and fourteen on one's feet with wit and wits and enjoying life to the full. Further, the experiment with rats, and the observation that skid row bums have clean arteries show that a moderate amount of alcohol daily - like a glass of wine - should enhance the effect.
Eddie sits and Sam is first to say "Thanks young doc, I hope you don't mind if my lady here asks you later for a few food lists of what she should or shouldn't cook for me."
A new voice interrupts. Everyone looks at the 15 year-old boy who has been speed writing down everything. He asks "Ain't you ignorin' heredity, Mr Medical Student? At my high school we are learnin' in general science that how long a life you will live is mostly in your genes and ain't nuthin' anyone can do about that? Ain't it so?"
The new intern, Dr. Henry answers before Eddie can think what to say. "That is a good question. It happens I did my master's degree in genetics before medical school and I am particularly up on the genetics of longevity. First, the common observation, which has some basis in life expectancy statistics, that living long is genetic is misleading in our discussion here because what we are addressing in this seminar is what I would call healthy longevity. Eddie earlier said it well - living past age eighty on one's feet with wit and wits. Today what we see for an example of longevity is an old hulk who can't remember what he did five minutes ago. Yes, there may be a genetic case for living as long as the old hulk. But I'd rather die with an intact mind at sixty-five than live senile into my eighty's. Probably the most pertinent data on the genetics of longevity are the paramecia, These single-cell micro animals swim in ponds, and experiments have followed generations of each from a single original forebear paramecium. And what the experimenters found is that after generations that are equivalent to one hundred and twenty years of human life all the offspring of a particular paramecium eventually become unable to reproduce and the cell line dies off. What this suggests is that Nature has a program built into the genes for aging of a cell line that extends a little more than one hundred years. And since we humans are metazoans, or many-cell animals, it means the genetic program of our cells should predict a little more than one hundred years of life in good health and then an ending of our reproducing cells and programmed death.
Dr Henry looks around and stops for a moment, then continues. "So the aging we presently see is not due to genetics but to the insults of living badly, not eating well, being harmed by the wear and tear of existence - like bangs, and poisons and radiation."
Dr. Henry sits and a silence ensues broken by Professor Edwardes standing and saying "OK, folks on that dramatic bit let's end the formal seminar. We never answer all the questions in Seminar. We ask them and hopefully stimulate young fellows like Victor here - he indicates the 15-year-old boy - to take up the study and generate answers that will help the human race."
He turns to Nicola. "Mr Nicola now is your turn to lead us. In the next room we have a spread of pizza and pasta and today, since wine has been mentioned as a key to healthy longevity, everyone will be allowed one glass of Chianti red. The seminar is ended but please continue the conversation in tete-a-tetes."
One conversation tete-a-tete is Eddie's introducing Nina to Dr Stan with the idea that Nina's encountering Stan will lead her into psychoanalysis.
For next, click 15.11 Scene of a Medical Mistake
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