The Spectator Bird

Joe continues to bemoan the “enemy”: the counterculture, modern youth in general, and a society that “does not value the old in the slightest, finds them an expense and an embarrassment” (109). He includes Césare Rulli in this number.

Inviting a live wire like Césare to lunch, Joe suggests, was not far removed from the deflation of stepping out of Stanford’s concert hall into the sprawling “counterculture” of the campus, with its students who are not so much hostile to old people as completely unaware of them and their value. Joe is delivering this tirade to Ruth, who pushes back at his “prejudice”: “These are just healthy normal kids going about their business in a place where they have every right to feel at home and you and I don’t” (111).

On a walk through campus, Joe and Ruth encounter Bruce and Rosie Bliven, a couple in their mid-eighties who radiate the sort of happiness and equanimity that Joe sorely lacks. Joe tries to put this down to the “mellowing” effects of advanced age but privately recognizes that the couple’s resiliency makes him feel “ashamed” of his curmudgeonly tendencies. Next, they are passed by another couple, a pair of students with all the accouterments of Joe’s despised “counterculture” who nevertheless smile warmly at the older couple and offer pleasantries.