Old Friends

Ninety-year-old Lou quit school after the eighth grade, worked for the rest of his life, and stayed with the same woman for nearly seventy years. Seventy-two-year-old Joe was chief probation officer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, holds a law degree, and has faced the death of a son and the raising of a mentally challenged daughter. Now, the two men are roommates in a nursing home. Despite coming from very different backgrounds, the two become close friends. Focusing on these two men as well as introducing us to the other aging residents of Linda Manor in Northampton, Massachusetts, literary journalist Tracy Kidder examines the sorrows and joys of growing older and the universal struggle to find meaning in the face of mortality.