David Greenberger: I'm David Greenberger. The work that I've been doing since 1979 is my conversations with a range of elderly people with an eye towards trying to get to know these people for a reading audience or a listening audience.

Woman, pink & white shirt: We don't have enough to choose from in life.

David Greenberger: I had gone to art school, studied painting, and somebody told me about a job at a nursing home. As soon as I set foot in that environment, the things people were saying were just full of character.

What's more important, romance or food?

Man, red button up shirt: Ah... Romance. Was that Shelley who said "A thing of beauty is a joy forever?"

David Greenberger: I think that some of the things that go wrong with people interacting with the elderly is that they treat them as if they're broken. The person who feels whole is dispensing pity. If you're doing that, you're not seeing somebody eye-to-eye. You set up a dynamic where you're above them and looking over - giving a helping hand. Sometimes that's not what somebody needs. It's just like, accept me as I am.

I was writing down things they had said. I started gathering all this stuff, typed it all up and I ran them off on the copier there at the nursing home, and I gave it the name of The Duplex Planet. It just felt like this other world I was in.

Here's something that Arthur Wallace told me, and his picture is right here. "I'm too old for exercises. I don't need to go through that. I had enough calisthenics when I was young. I belonged to that YMCA for 17 years. I'd have all kinds of exercises, and give the guys Turkish baths. I'm what they call 'old.' Me and Arthur Brown are old. These other guys ain't old, they're in their 50s and 60s. My eyes are kinda dim because I read too much. I take an interest in things."

I made a very conscious decision that I should stop painting. This was my art. After about a dozen years, I knew that the way to really reach more people is by having a book out. A couple books came out in fairly rapid succession. At the same time, there was a comic book adaptation of this material, Duplex Planet Illustrated. We did that for about 3 years. During that same time in the mid '90s or so, somebody asked about me doing a spoken word CD.

(David reading, with percussion) "Everything belongs to someone - television, radio, Motorola radio in the dashboard of a car." I started working with a range of different musical ensembles.

(David reading) "After I had my stroke, I dreamed that I was a FBI agent, and they called me 'Big Al.'"

There's two approaches that can prevent you from having a real relationship with somebody; approaching the elderly as if they have the wisdom of the ages or putting them on a pedestal in some way, and then the other thing is treating the elderly as solely a repository of their past.

When you do ask people about the things that are the major turning points in their life, they've told these things so many times, the emotion isn't in the telling anymore. You're getting a performance. I like to focus on the things that make the uniqueness of somebody's voice come across.

I really felt fortunate meeting these people, and including them in this felt important to me, and still does, because we're not often given a glimpse of people going through this. They have become the face and the characteristics of aging. But these little glimpses are really just a way for two people to be in the same place at the same time sharing in the common human experience of just being alive. Good seeing you!