Secret Agent Man
What if our homes help prolong our lives? asks one of Margot Singer’s haunting essays in Secret Agent Man. Even after being away for years, she thinks of her childhood house in Cochituate, Massachusetts, as an anchor and feels comforted to find her parents still embedded in its disheveled coziness: “Like an enchanted briar hedge, our parents’ house and all of their possessions have grown up around them, rooting them in place.” It can seem forbidding, she notes, even threatening as they age beyond the capacity to keep up with daily maintenance—in the yard, taking out trash, shoveling snow and ice. But then, what if the house is actually less of a looming health risk than the thing that’s helping to keep them alive?
Singer, author of the novel Underground Fugue and the short story collection The Pale of Settlement, is a professor of creative writing at Denison University. Unexpected questions permeate the essays in this collection, all of which are personal memoirs accentuated by Singer’s insistence on stepping back from the personal—changing the scale of her perspective—to connect her experiences more deeply to the wider world and humanity.
Thus, in her musings on her parents’ home, Singer summons a famous 1979 study by Ellen Langer of Harvard, who conducted an experiment with elderly men invited to spend five days in a monastery that had been designed to reflect the world of the late 1950s. As Singer describes it, “the men were instructed not just to reminisce about the past, but to try to be the person they’d been then.” Just one week later, Langer recorded marked improvements in all the testable biomarkers of age. The men’s memories and their grip strength improved, as well as their gait, posture, vision, and hearing. In the same way, Singer sees that her own parents are more energetic and sharper in their home—and this gives her and her brother some pause whenever they deliberate moving them to elderly housing for their own protection. Time really seems to run more slowly in the old house, and any change might break the spell.
