It took Austin two minutes to replace me. As I rounded the corner in Zingerman’s Roadhouse one Sunday afternoon to complete a game of cribbage, my seat was taken by an 80-year-old man. During the span of a bathroom break, my boyfriend had selected a stranger to spend his day with.
I was offended — not because I was replaced, but because befriending old people is my thing. For years, my penchant for collecting part-time job groupies and nursing home to-bes shaped my life often more than the jobs or volunteer opportunities themselves. Now my boyfriend of a couple weeks had one-upped me in a game he didn’t even know he was playing.
You should consider befriending an old person every time you leave the house. I’m not only saying be polite to the alarmingly old grocery store clerk or offer to hold doors open a hair longer for the woman with the walker. You should also approach random elderly people with the same level of interest as you do your closest friends.
After exchanging pleasantries, the old man introduced himself to me as Joseph Kubek, a prominent local photographer in the Ann Arbor area. It was his birthday, and his table near us harbored many of his relatives who were visiting from out of town.
The first thing Kubek taught me was the “Kubek Hug” — an eerily prolonged hug in which you share a breath and only let go when it feels right. It’s supposed to be a soul connection, a spiritual moment between two people carving out intimacy in the hurried nature of everyday life. Though this sounded charming, I advocate for talking to strangers — not necessarily touching them.
We didn’t hug that afternoon, but he did promise to mail us bookmarks. When we exchanged information, Kubek asked us very earnestly “You promise?” when we said we’d call.
When it comes to connecting with older people, there is a heightened responsibility to follow through on the things you say you’ll do. While their lives were at one point as hectic as young people’s, many have fewer and fewer opportunities to connect with people beyond their inner circle. Life does not get less rich as you age, but in many ways it does get smaller.
In an age which increasingly lacks intergenerational living and community, befriending strangers like Kubek is a small opportunity for young and old to learn and love one another.
A month later, Austin and I drove to a Greek restaurant in a Dearborn strip mall on a Saturday afternoon. Before the car’s engine ceased, we could see Kubek’s silhouette outlined in the laminated window, a crooked baseball cap and a mound of photo folders on the chair next to him. He’d been there before us at his signature table, setting up a series of images to show us that he’d taken throughout his career. Nature scenes, bizarre ’70s family portraits, deteriorated portraits he had restored: What to us seemed a charming display of random pictures was to Kubek his life’s work, neatly contained in felt folders and piled into the corner of the diner’s front table.
Austin and I spent three hours in the restaurant. The waitress knew him. He hardly had to look at the menu. He knew the ins and outs of how to get the most bang for your buck. Every detail of lunch had an anecdote. The restaurant itself belonged to a longtime friend who had offered him a cheap apartment when he was left high and dry after a failed business debacle. But with Kubek, all ends in triumph.
Kubek’s life motto is Carl Jung’s concept of “synchronicity.” Instead of some cleansed psychoanalytic definition of meaningful relationships between events, Kubek perceives this word almost as a spell. When he’d connect dots between important people in his life or serendipitously timed success, he’d almost whisper “synchronicity.” As he’d point out the faces of deceased friends in images he took of trees or the night sky, your ears would perk up and await the magic word.
Our lunch with Kubek wasn’t about us, and our generation really likes when things are about us. From highly personalized algorithmic feeds to mundane routines, it is important to remember that others’ stories are just as important as ours. This is what relationships with older people can offer: a humbling reminder that one day we, too, will jump at the chance to share our stories with unsuspecting young people trying to complete a game of cards.
Ally Hall is a senior studying Rhetoric and Media.
