Author: Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is the author, most recently, of American Eldercide: How it Happened, How to Prevent It (2024), which has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Her earlier book, Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People (2017), won both the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars and the APA’s Florence Denmark Award for Contributions to Women and Aging. Gullette’s previous books—Agewise (2011) and Declining to Decline (1997)—also won awards. Her essays are often cited as “notable” in Best American Essays. She is a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University.

On the Unsung Pleasures of Very Long Friendships

Posted on March 7, 2025March 23, 2026 by Margaret Morganroth Gullette

I made my first real friend when I was 11 and she was 12. Marsha moved in on the block. Soon after, her mother saw my mother in the backyard and said she had a daughter about my age. My mother said, let her come for lunch. Marsha wrote me recently, “Loved your mom. I remember the first time we met and I had lunch at your house. We had grilled cheese w tomato.” That was 72 years ago.

We had an enriched childhood together. Her jokes cracked me up. We played pickup sticks for hours, practicing the small motor control that would enable us to paint and draw later. We started a “firm” that didn’t do anything, but whose mere name, Morgan and White, let us believe we were real artists and writers.

We argued about whether the modernist movie theater, the Midwood, was more beautiful than the baroque Loews Kings on Flatbush Avenue. We did puppet theater in her basement for neighborhood kids. We put out a newspaper of our doings called The Little Issue. Only my uncle Jack bought a copy; he paid 25 cents, probably to encourage writing, typing and doing layout. We started a novel that began “Doctor Boshkov pressed the tips of his well-manicured fingers together.” On the anniversary of the day we met, we had an outing to Manhattan.

Marsha visited me in college. She kept me from putting on a hoity-toity North Shore of Boston accent by laughing her head off the first time I tried it on. We shared the travails of dating. We did our first trip to Europe together, living on $5 a day, going our separate ways in museums as art lovers do and telling our finds at dinner.

After college we never lived in the same city again. She married. I went to various graduate schools, married and settled around Boston. In the child-raising years, we saw little of each other but kept up. When she divorced, her ex-husband kindly called to tell me she would like to hear from me. We picked up the friendship again. I have one of her paintings where I see it every day. When her second husband died, when she moved, we talked more often.

Nowadays, in our 80s, we email about our kids and grandkids, we discuss independent living and Continuing Care Retirement Communities. She’s as instinctually funny as she ever was. Her Facebook posts are either beautiful or a hoot. “Morgan and White” was a prologue to a working life: “Morgan” became a writer and “White” an artist—under our real names, of course.

I’m averse to nostalgia, I want to share my day to day and my opinions on the world’s current events. But it matters that I remember her parents, and she, mine. Marsha’s still one of my besties. She’s like my cousins—also childhood allies whose lives still crisscross with mine.

I’ve made newer friends, of course. But it’s delightful how many friends from college or graduate school are still lunchtime and Facetime and email pals. Andrea, in Andover, is a friend from college who became a bestie in our middle years, when both of us were starting second careers.

Some friends are distant in space. Connie is in LA, Penny is in Baltimore, Caroline in Maine. I’m in touch by email with one middle school friend, two high school friends. My women college classmates meet on Zoom once a month. We are more politically alike than we used to be; we are all feminists now.

Who said, “The last of life, for which the first was made”? It was Browning, of course, from “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” not a very good poem but worth it for this line. We never stop needing the old friends and relatives who have known us through many changes of our life course. Indeed, we cherish them more in later life, as some loved ones die and others move away.

My granddaughter, starting college, meeting many people, goes through the normal selection and elimination processes. She seems enchanted by the fact that I have kept so many close friends from those youthful years. Being accompanied as she grows up: it must seem miraculous.

My life course ahead, like everyone’s, is still unknown territory. I prize the companionship, while growing older. And it’s axiomatic that my friends and I have more in common now than we ever did. How could it be otherwise? Anecdote by anecdote, story by story, we add to the Memory Palace we share.

My Father’s Frugal Habits Make Sense Now

Posted on July 24, 2020March 23, 2026 by Margaret Morganroth Gullette

This thoughtful blog about a change of heart was originally posted on both Next Avenue and Forbes on May 12. It appears here with the permission of the author.

My father had plenty of habits that irritated my mother. But nothing irritated her more than “Marty being cheap.” As a child, I didn’t understand it either.

For instance, my father turned off the lights in rooms that people had just left. Sometimes we were leaving just to come right back in, but whenever he was home, he would march across the little hallway from wherever he was at either end of the house to click the light switches down. Did he like a dark house?

With the lights off, the forest-green end of the house was as dismal as a real Hansel and Gretel woods. My mother would march right back from wherever she had been to defiantly flick the switches up.

My father also saved things. He wore the same, plaid, flannel shirts year after year, one on top of another, even indoors. In the basement shop, when I was invited, he took long, thick, crooked nails that had been pulled out of boards with the claw end of the hammer and smashed them with the fat, butt end, so they straightened out like new.

He saved rusted nails, which had turned a delicate, copper color I liked. Each size went into its own unmatched, little, glass jar: screws, screw-eyes, all the iron nails: the tenpenny, brads, roofing nails, slender, white, finish nails and even some upholstery nails with stubby shanks hidden by golden, curving, indented tops.

But the frugal habit my mother mocked most was my father’s taking the little, bitty soap ends and mashing them together, so they made a small, irregular cake or many-sided, oily, squashed muffin.

He didn’t explain to me why he was doing any of those things. He didn’t explain anything, except, rarely, American politics. He was a silent man.

Maybe in those days, my mother flattened him. But she was a good mother to me, and you don’t judge your parents when you are still so young it’s difficult to tell them apart. Later, when I was married, they came to visit to say they were a happy couple now. My mother, as it were, apologized. She said gaily, because it was all in the past, “I didn’t let him be the captain of his own ship.” They had a good year before he got sick with ALS.

As an adult, I used to tell friends those amusing, childhood stories about my freaky father—straightening bent nails, turning lights off, saving soap ends. People recognized he did those things to save money.

In the middle class, where my husband and I had slowly risen to occupy a fairly secure place, saving money had begun to seem odd. It was “cheap,” just as my upwardly mobile mother had said, even before the postwar boom really got started lifting our boat.

My generation’s goal, as we were moving up economic ladders, was to spend on visible objects, showing taste as well as means.

But over time, I noticed that as I told the stories, they had lost the tinge of being amusing foibles. They began to edge toward being about thrift. Conspicuous consumption had seemed cruelly elite during the Great Depression, which marked both my parents, though in opposite ways.

Likewise, after the Great Recession of 2008, waste of any kind began to seem excessive, ostentatious, brutal and stupid. Saving became not a mere trend, but a value and a virtue of those who could manage it. The planet cannot take the rapid, steady diminution of its resources forever.

Plenty of people are replicating some of my dad’s frugal habits. Anyone with any sense now wants to save electricity, because so much of it still comes from fossil fuels. Everyone goes around smoothing down the dimmers.

I’ve come to see differently what I once thought of as my father’s eccentricities. I’ve come closer to him in spirit.

Since he gave me his jars, my own basement shop has held his nail collection and I draw on the legacy.

Just recently, when I mentioned the soap ends, a close friend said with a smile that was only slightly embarrassed, “How do you do that?”

“Oh, it’s quick and easy,” I began. “You get a few slivers wet and soft and slimy, and you crush them and press them and rub them around until they hold together. It feels so nice.”