On a recent visit, my dermatologist pointed to a few spots she needed to freeze before those “confused cells” had the opportunity to grow into something harmful. Then she pointed to other spots on my body and said these were simply “the barnacles of life.”*

I told her I was going to steal that line!

My doctor’s comment came back as I was thinking about the things that happen along life’s highways. We experience ecstatic joy and shocking tragedies. We face times where we are confused and uncertain. We are dealt hands by fate. We also accumulate barnacles.

Are there secrets to navigating life to help us understand what matters and what are just barnacles? Can those secrets help us live longer?

Well, yes and no.

The secret to living a long life? Pure luck. If our genes and the fates all align we may be one of those who outlives the average human. Or we may work at our diet and exercise but then be hit by an inattentive driver the next time we cross a street.

But . . . the secret to living a happy and useful life is entirely within our control. How we respond is important. That’s the core of response-ability: the ability to respond.

And that’s the message of a new book about the life of Dr. Charles White.

The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-year-old Man (2023) by David Von Drehle is the story of Charlie White, a man born before radio who lived to use a smartphone. Upon moving to Kansas City, Von Drehle meets White — at the time his 102-year-old neighbor — and strikes up a friendship. Over seven years he learns that Charlie lost his father at an early age, the victim of a freak accident. But it was in his response to that tragedy that Charlie learned how to live. This parable of persistence and durability points the way toward a happy and useful life.

Charlie’s life is remarkable in part because of all the changes and upheaval of the 20th century. Charlie worked to help his single mother, yet he kept up with his studies. At the age of seventeen he graduated from high school and leaves with two friends for an audacious cross-country adventure, traveling first in a Model T Ford then by hopping freight trains.

This first adventure wasn’t Charlie’s last, for he had a remarkable ability to learn and grow. He taught himself to play the saxophone, swinging with the sounds of the Jazz Age while saving money for medical school. When his application to Northwestern was turned down, he hopped a train to Evanston to meet — unannounced — with the dean and talked his way in. Charlie learned medicine at a time when it was primarily a profession for helping ease nature’s cures or the suffering of the dying. That training found him racing aboard ambulances through Depression-era gangster wars and later — after a stint as a military doctor in World War II changed his practice —improvising techniques for early open-heart surgery.

Throughout this story, Von Drehle returns to make the point that Charlie chose how to respond. “Do the right thing” Charlie explained to an interviewer late in life. Whatever the challenge “this will pass, and you’ve got to work through it, and hold the line. There’s no future in negativism.”

A single sheet of notepaper found among Charlie’s belongings shows that the interviewer’s question had stayed with him. Charlie “sat with the notepad and distilled his philosophy of life.” And he began boldly.

Think freely.

Practice patience.

Smile often.

Make and keep friends.

Tell loved ones how you feel.

Forgive and seek forgiveness.

Observe miracles.

Make them happen.

The page was filled “as though the operating system of a happy and productive life could be written in thirty or forty lines of code.”

Cry when you need to.

Make some mistakes.

Learn from them.

Voh Drehle sees the life well lived as consisting of two parts. First, we take the simple world of childhood and discover its complications. But what Charlie had discovered and was outlining on this piece of notepaper is that “if we live long enough, we might soften into the second stage, and become simplifiers.”

What we face might be complicated, but what we do about it is simple . . . Charlie lived so long that the veil of complexity fell away entirely and he saw that life is not so hard as we tend to make it.

The essentials are familiar, Von Drehle suggests, “not because they are trite, but because they are true.”

Work hard.

Spread joy.

Take a chance.

Enjoy wonder.

This lovely little book is not perfect. Charlie’s life was remarkable, but he faced it from a place of privilege as a white male in 20th century America. There are few people of color in Charlie’s world — or at least the part that Von Drehle shares with us. It is too narrow to be, as a jacket blurb suggests, a serious history of the last 100 years.

Also, on several occasions Charlie works as a scab — or union buster — on the railroads. Von Drehle wrote a book about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, so he understands better than most the dangers of corporate greed built on the broken bodies of exploited workers. Yet he apparently never asks Charlie why he made the choice to cross the picket lines of workers trying to make a living in a notoriously anti-union industry. It is an odd omission.

Finally, on the day that Von Drehle meets his new 102-year-old neighbor, Charlie is washing his girlfriend’s car, the car that had sat in the driveway overnight. “The Saturday night date with the glamorous driver,” Von Drehle deduces, “had developed into the sort of sleepover that makes a man feel like being especially nice the next morning.” Von Drehle repeatedly returns to this introduction. I don’t mind the story, but its repetitiveness suggests a bothersome mindset — macho, western, conservative-individualism — that doesn’t strengthen the book.

Notwithstanding these issues, grace notes abound in The Book of Charlie. It is a worthwhile read.

More to come . . .

DJB

*Skin barnacles, medically known as “seborrheic keratoses” are harmless, noncancerous growths that usually appear during adulthood.