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By Root 1261 0

his “ALL-OK” is. He rises at 5 A.M. each morning in his white Cape Cod house on Lee Highway in pastoral Amissville, in the midst of Rappahannock County horse country, just east of the Blue Ridge. Because, in winter, he keeps the thermostat set at fifty-five at night, he quickly dons his white terrycloth bathrobe and nudges the thermostat up as soon as he gets out of bed in the morning. He feeds his twelve-year-old black-and-white cat Cookie and has a short conversation with him. Then, with a cup of hot chocolate, he heads upstairs, with the sociable cat trailing. He sits down in his straight-backed chair at his metal-topped desk, turns on his custom-built computer, and begins to probe the minds of others and to take on civilization. That is not as metaphorical as it sounds. For the last seven years, beginning when he was about eighty-two, he has been typing out virtually every word of Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven-volume opus, The Story of Civilization, and leading an international online discussion group. Robby’s group has so far made it through seven volumes of the landmark work.

When he started this group, now on Seniorlearn.com, he had already facilitated discussions on Studs Terkel’s The Good War and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, among other works. He headed the discussion of Civilization: “Where do we come from? Where are we now? Where are we headed?” It is, he says, his interest in those questions—his unquenchable interest in people or, as he might say, everything—that drives him.

Each morning before he undertakes the deconstruction of the history of civilization, Robby reads about its most recent events in four online newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Then he reads and answers a trove of daily e-mails, showers, dresses, gulps down a handful of vitamins, and hustles on his way. Three days a week, he drives his red 1998 Toyota Camry fifteen miles north from his white, two-story Cape Cod, to an 8 A.M. Chamber of Commerce breakfast meeting, where he participates in old-fashioned networking. Five days a week, he arrives at his office by 9 A.M. With rare exception, he sees a patient every hour until evening. Except, that is, for time he allots for his daily two-mile walk or an hour at the hospital gym and to grab a salad for lunch in the state-of-the-art, glass-enclosed hospital cafeteria. (Robby has kept a mostly vegetarian diet since he was in his fifties.) He usually devotes Saturdays to doing paperwork in the office. And that’s it, except for the nights he goes dancing or the weekends when he volunteers at some community event, such as ushering at the community theater, or when he needs time to write his monthly column for Warrenton Lifestyle magazine. “I’m slowing down. I’m finally beginning to understand the saying the spirit is willing, but the body isn’t,” Robby declared earnestly after reviewing his schedule with me.

For all of his compassion for others, he admits to feeling impatient when he hears an able-bodied person use the excuse of age to resign from doing what he says he wished he could. Too often defeat and laziness creep into a person’s belief system, he says. “They say, ‘Oh well, I can’t do that’ or ‘Pretty soon I’m going to be sixty-five and then I won’t be able to do very much anyway.’ So they don’t bother to take care of themselves because there’s no point in it. They’re going to rot away anyway, they think. Whereas me, I’m going to love to be one hundred. How do I know this? Barring an unfortunate accident, I know this because I keep going until all of a sudden it’s nine o’clock at night and I’ve got to get ready for bed. I don’t have time for this garbage of ‘I’m too old.’ ”

From time to time, he worries about whether he should mention his age to prospective clients. Few, if any, would guess it correctly. He stands erect. He moves with fluidity and strength. His hair remains dark, his attitudes liberal, his mind relentlessly curious. “People get caught up in stereotypes. Occasionally—rarely—a person hears how old I am