How to Face Change, Big Change? With Great Aplomb : Aging: ‘Retired’ may be an inaccurate description. For when it seems you’d be the most tired, you must become the most elastic.

Barbara Bush has a book out, and while I’d just as soon she dispensed with the trials of learning to drive a car after 12 years of being chauffeured, there is yet another lesson here about aging and adaptability. The conventional adage is that the old grow set in their ways. But from what I’ve seen recently, the old have a great deal to teach us about change.

The Bushes aren’t the only ones of their Depression-era generation to be enduring perhaps the most dramatic upheavals of their lives, in their case the abrupt loss of power, prestige and life as they’ve known it. My parents, my friends’ parents and my parents’ friends, all in their 70s or beyond, are facing their own versions of physical, financial and emotional turmoil--with stunning aplomb.

How do they do it? How do they lose a spouse of 50 years, suffer a debilitating illness, a crippling injury, a sudden reversal of fortune, and still maintain their wit, their humor, their contentedness, their essential self-knowledge?

Is there a secret they picked up somewhere on the beaches of Normandy or the waters of Tokyo Bay? Is this the ripple effect of the Great Crash, the Eisenhower years, the rise and fall of Camelot, the ‘70s and the ‘80s?

Mrs. A had a stroke two years ago. She and Mr. A had just returned from their daily morning walk when she slumped to the kitchen floor. She blacked out. The paramedics came. When she regained consciousness, her right side was paralyzed and, even though she was fully lucid, she could not speak.

These two people, whom I’ve known most of my life, have always been an inspiration--happy, open, tolerant, active, engaging and extremely funny, in a Southern way. Today, they’re an inspiration because, even though their circumstances have been so radically altered, they’re still happy, open, tolerant, a little less active but just as engaging, y’all.

Mrs. A, a domestic engineer extraordinaire, has ceded her former duties to Mr. A, a retired sales executive who now cooks, cleans, launders and entertains the attendees at his wife’s “ladies’ luncheons” with his own cucumber-and-cottage cheese sandwiches.

When a tawny spot turned up on his best blue tablecloth, he washed the whole thing in canola oil, aired it out for a few days, dipped it in a little paint thinner to get rid of the oily residue and, lo and behold, the spot has now been completely eclipsed by an imperceptible overall tawniness. “Good as new,” he says with the pride of Martha Stewart.

My own parents, compelled by a variety of convoluted forces to engage in some concentrated down-scaling, are completely un-fazed by their newfound material slimness. I, hustling to keep pace with the mortgage, the car loans and the credit card bills, am in awe.

I find myself asking them: “You mean all that stuff you always told us about how the only really important things in life are your family, your honesty and your sense of fair play--you mean, you really meant all that?”

Sometimes I think these forty-something years, these “My So-Called Life” years, as the hot new television drama is titled (it’s supposed to be about the travails of an adolescent, but it’s as much about the travails of being a parent to one) are the most difficult. With all the stresses, the pressures, the competing demands, the disintegrating marriages, the cute little children turned to churlish teens, with everybody in the office getting younger, the college tab getting bigger and the elderly parents ailing, these are the years that pose the greatest challenge.

And then I look around and ahead, and I realize we haven’t seen anything yet. The deepest jolts, the most sudden shifting of the fault lines, seem to come just when you’re finally supposed to be “retired” from life’s earthquakes. When it seems you’d be most tired, most brittle, most resistant to change, you must become the most elastic.

Yes, there’s a lesson here, about adaptability and survivability, about integrity and dignity and knowing who and what you are at your very core.

There’s a lesson about what, in most of the world’s cultures, they call wisdom.