His Oldest Friend: The Story of an Unlikely Bond - Hardcover

Kleinfield, Sonny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805075801 ISBN 13: 9780805075809

Publisher: Times Books, 2005

Synopsis

A vivid portrait of an uncommon friendship that spans generations, uniting the wisdom of youth with the spark of old age

They met under the least auspicious circumstances. He was a teenage volunteer at a nursing home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was a wheelchair-bound resident in her nineties. He was poor, Hispanic, living in a rented room in the barrio, separated from his family. Her life, at least before arthritis hobbled her, was comfortable, and her daughters and grandchildren visited as often as they could. But when Margaret Oliver’s daughter hired Elvis Checo to look in on her mother a few afternoons each week, nobody realized that this would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
In His Oldest Friend, Sonny Kleinfield of The New York Times takes us inside the lives of these two unlikely friends to explore the world of the very young and the very old, showing how underappreciated these groups often are—a mystery to one another and to so many of us in the middle-class adult population. Too often we tend to group together “youth” and “the elderly,” submerging individuals into a group identity. But Elvis and Margaret offer each other that rarest of gifts: recognition and affirmation as a unique human being. Kleinfield opens their lives to us, and shows how their bond of friendship rescued each of them from the bleakness that defeats so many of the youngest and oldest among us.

About this title

About the Author

Sonny Kleinfield is a reporter for The New York Times and the author of seven previous books. He has contributed articles to The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, and he was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal before joining the Times. He shared in a Pulitzer Prize for a Times series on race in America and has received a number of journalism awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Meyer Berger Award, an American Society of Newspaper Editors Award, and the Gerald Loeb Award. A native of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, he is a graduate of New York University and lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Every now and then I say, ‘Why am I here?’” Ms. Oliver was saying to Elvis. “My answer is this is the way of life and nature made it this way. So you deal with it as much as possible by
distracting yourself.”
Elvis piped up: “Miss Oliver, think of it as you’re having a little vacation from everything you’ve done before.”
“Oh, Elvis,” she said. “You’re like a breath of spring.”
He had to smile. Seeing her so much, he
understood her alternative universe. “Reaching old age is loneliness, depression,” is how he would explain it. “You don’t feel you’re part of the world anymore. You’re in the way. You’re a pest. You have to depend on someone. That disturbs Miss Oliver. My goal is to make her still feel part of the world.”
In short order, he came to think of her as his oldest friend. He actually once told her straight out: “If I had never met you, I’d probably be dead or in jail. I grew up around drug dealers all my life. I wouldn’t have any choice but to stand on the corner, too.”
And so, in perhaps the most important hours of his week, he lost himself in the twisting labyrinth of this nursing home, and in particular, in room 470, becoming true
intimates with a wise old woman named Margaret Oliver who never thought of herself as a savior.

About this edition

• Publisher: Times Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0805075801
• ISBN 13: 9780805075809
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288