Well into his 90s, my dad would drive an hour-and-a-half from Wilmington, Delaware, to Atlantic City two or three times a week to play blackjack. He won money on most days because he was a highly skilled card counter. (He’d up his bet when the odds were in his favor and lower it — or go to the bathroom — when the odds were against him.)
He once told me that while he enjoyed the mental challenge of playing blackjack, he mainly went to Atlantic City (“AC,” as he called it) for the social connection. He liked being around other people and cracking corny jokes. Example: He’d say to a woman, “Say, do you file your nails?” When the woman said “Yes,” he’d say, “That’s funny, I throw mine away.”
As I get just a little older, I appreciate how important it is to connect with other people. A friend refers to such connections as “kindom.”
Personal connections do matter for people of all ages. Consider the negative impact of COVID on young people who were deprived of daily interactions with their peers because they to go to school virtually. Steve Cole, director of the Social Genomics Core Laboratory at the University of California, has studied how the physiological pathways of loneliness affects mind and body function. “Loneliness acts as a fertilizer for other diseases. The biology of loneliness can accelerate the buildup of plaque in arteries, help cancer cells grow and spread and promote inflammation in the brain leading to Alzheimer’s disease. Loneliness promotes several different types of wear and tear on the body.” More than half of all prison suicides occur in solitary confinement. I’ve heard stories of older people being taken in by scammers, just because the scammer has claimed to be their “friend.”
The message? Perhaps we should be more intentional about making connections with friends and family and, yes, strangers. Connecting with strangers doesn’t come naturally for us introverts, but the payoff is almost always worth it. My wife Tina has no problem on this front; she’ll reach out to anyone, any time, everywhere.
Here are some possible New Year’s resolutions that might help us experience the joys of kindom:
• Make more calls to friends or family members just to check in. Do so even when it’s not a special occasion such as a birthday or holiday. And it takes almost no time to text someone, but don’t get upset if an immediate response is not forthcoming.
• Start conversations with more strangers wherever we happen to be: in a line at the grocery store or bank or while waiting for a table at a restaurant. Tina and I once developed a good friendship with a couple with whom we shared thoughts following a movie at the Frontier Cafe.
• Join groups of people with similar interests. (Be careful if the “similar interest’ involves drinking or gambling). Back in the days when I was training for a marathon, it was much easier for me to keep on task if I ran with someone else or, almost as good, compared notes with someone else who was training for the same marathon.
I wrote an article a few months ago that suggested that one can ease loneliness by creating and then sharing some form of art with other people. One can also ease the pain of a bad health diagnosis or the loss of a spouse or friend by sharing the sorrow with others in similar circumstances.
Sometimes my dad would call me up and tell a joke and then hang up. I would do the same with him. Odd, yes, but the brief exchange kept us connected. I also got some good jokes out of it along with, er, not so good ones. (We did have real conversations from time to time.) I’m glad to connect with my two sons who live out west every day as we share our scores playing Wordle, Quordle and Octordle.
We’d all do well to heed the old Swedish motto that says, “Sharing joy is a double joy. Sharing sorrow is half a sorrow.”
David Treadwell, a Brunswick writer, welcomes commentary and suggestions for future “Just a Little Old” columns at dtreadw575@aol.com.
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