Young and Old

   Going to visit my mother regularly has been rewarding in that slowly --ever so slowly-- I am being opened to a fish-eyed view of the world.  On one side are the young, the med-techs and the aides who are there to wipe butts and put up with all sorts of changing moods, jobs that are probably not paid well (or as well as they should be) and are likely a grudging stepping-stone for their next career move.  But many of them are still enthusiastic, perhaps seeing such tempers and accusatory remarks from the elderly on a grander scale, a commonality which is likely shared by many in such facilities...they steal, they take things, they come in my room and look around, all things I hear regularly from my mother.  The nursing assistants and aides just nod their heads as if it's all little more than old news.  And then to jump to the other side, there are the residents who have so many fascinating stories but find that those are coupled with failing memories, their tales sharp and clear in some areas and quite blurred (or gone) in others as if macular degeneration of the brain has happened.  Visits are brief even if they are long, or so I've come to feel, almost as if I were having guests over for dinner and enjoying the evening but when it was over it seemed that the time has passed too quickly and suddenly there I was awakening the next morning to start another day.  In all of this, I am somewhere in the middle.

    It is too late (or impossible) to go back so I remain in a unique position, standing on the tracks of life and getting a glimpse of both the arriving and departing trains somewhere off in the distance, both coming closer and closer (ironically) and my "ticket" being good for only one direction.  It's still an exciting time, as if energized by all the animated antics of the arriving passengers and relating a bit to where they've been, the long hours traveling balanced with the new experiences, the drudgery and boredom meshed with the learning and melodic excess, the feeling of so many years ahead coupled with the fading away of childhood.  I couldn't help but realize that in standing there I appeared to have moved closer a notch, that I was now paying more attention to my train and to where I was heading and much less to that of the crossing train, as if after so many passing trains mine was finally nearing...that's the one, the one headed to places unknown, the one for which I had a ticket, the one I could now suddenly see coming off in the distance and somehow right on time.

    It's a fleeting moment that realization, that you notice that heads still turn but they're somehow different.  You laugh more with people in your group and relate to how it was "back then," watching your advice and sage wisdom disappear like steam when you offer (or give) it to others.  Dang kids, for now "they" seem to all be kids.  It's no different from my days long ago when I was a youngster, my ears even then learning how to tune out and to listen to only what I wanted, a time when I felt that I knew more or knew better or would come to learn all of that later but on my own.  Didn't matter where that advice came from but looking back, it seemed more specific if it came from a parent...just go away; grandparents were a bit more understanding if apathetic and laughed with me and offered little in the way of targeted criticism, their shotgun approach of advice there for me to pick up when and where (and if) I wanted...just not quite yet.  Such is life...

   In the world of business this must be much more difficult as aging CEOs (or government administrations) feel that its adamant that you listen, each failing to recognize that the many working under them had already perfected their tuning out.  That spark of creativity and what worked so well then was now just an ember to so many others.  Get out of the way.  Here's one example that hit me, this from Fast Company on Snapchat, a media application soon to hit the IPO circuit: Daily Mail's Jon Steinberg, 38, jokes that Snapchat is the first product that ever made him "feel kind of old"; he recalls emailing Spiegel (cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel) to suggest an interface change he found confusing.  "He wrote to me and said, ‘People will figure it out—you’re not really the target.’ "   In other words, Snapchat isn’t for you, old man!  And what exactly is Snapchat?  If you're over 34, there's little need to ask...it's not meant for you (or me, obviously).

    I enjoy browsing through the some of the guided trips listed in the back of Sierra, the magazine end of the Sierra Club.  Doing so makes me realize just how much is out there, not only in the world itself but in the amount of people wanting to get out there and see that world.  And they highlight people who have taken such trips, many of them often new to the group's outings, people such as 91-year old Bob Turner who they describe as having an "unquenchable enthusiasm for adventure."  As the leader of one trip, Elaine Grace wrote that: "There were times when other participants much younger than Bob stayed on the boat because the weather was bad."  But that didn't deter him from going on all the side trips, some of which included kayaking or hiking in the rain.  "He has an amazing attitude."  As Bob himself admits, "I'm always smiling.  It's hard to frown."  And then there's newcomer Ginny Carlson who began taking some of the club's outings after her husband passed away.  She told the magazine: I talk to everyone: the bus driver, the person on the street, the hotel desk clerk.  I always smile and I ask a lot of questions.  I credit the Sierra Club and its wonderful participants for reminding me that saying yes to a new situation with strangers will bring friendships, laughter, and a sense of purpose.

    We can't know what goes on in someone else's head.  Rue Mapp told Sierra that although she loved the outdoors and its hiking adventures, she: ...lamented that she was invariably the sole African American in the group. So in 2009 she founded Outdoor Afro, an organization dedicated to connecting African Americans to nature..."When I was young, I asked my dad --who grew up in East Texas-- if he had ever known someone who had been lynched, and he said, 'Yes, lots of people.'  So we've had generations of terror in the woods in our collective imagination.  Until I asked my dad that question, I didn't realize the discomfort that the outdoors can have for us."   In the same issue, biologist E.O.Wilson pondered a scenario where humanity's occupation of earth was long gone, buried as certainly as that of the age of dinosaurs: Suppose that in the far-distant future geologists were to dig through Earth's crusted deposits to the strata spanning the past thousand years of our time.  They would encounter sharply defined layers of chemically altered soil.  They would recognize signatures of rapid climate changes.  They would uncover abundant fossil remains of domesticated plants and animals that had replaced most of Earth's prehuman fauna and flora.  They would excavate fragments of machines, and a veritable museum of deadly weapons. 

    The movie Arrival asked something similar, the creatures (us) somehow stuck in a phase of linear thinking, of past-present-future and yesterday-today-tomorrow thinking.  Why couldn't we see that time was anything but linear, a circle or perhaps a series of continuous circles (as in a Slinky) instead of a line, and that all of it was accessible at any point.  Old would meet young would meet old would meet time would meet...me.  George Saunders, author of the bestselling Lincoln in the Bardo told Literary Hub about his encounter following the election of Donald Trump: During those Trump rallies I got on an elevator.  And there was this family at the hotel, this multi-generational family, from a great-grandfather to this little kid, on the elevator with me and…it just seemed like all of them were drunk.  They weren’t even there for the Trump stuff, they were just crude, talking a bunch of nonsense.  And of course my knee-jerk response to myself was: “My God, we’re going to hell in a hand basket.”  But there’s another reaction to it, a trained reaction that says: “You know what, this also exists in the world…How would I write that?”  We all have our tendencies.  But the supreme artistic move is to be able to take that camera that we use to observe and judge the world and turn it back on oneself.  To be able to say: I am not ground zero.  I’m just one weird, interesting human manifestation.

   For me, I can continue to be amazed at grateful to see people at all stages in their life, of the stories and memories the elderly now placidly eating their meals have;  for many their minds are like homes that have been ransacked, their recollections and memories scattered about everywhere, some left in bits and pieces and others thankfully spared and all in one piece.  Luckily for them the treasure chest they hid wasn't found, the spot where it had been buried not yet discovered...but was that at this house or the last house, or maybe the house before that?  I think such thoughts when I read about things I once thought were new or recent only to discover the opposite, that the ratcheting socket wrench was invented in 1863 or that the electric dishwasher was created in 1886 (by a Victorian lady whose husband left her in debt and after inventing the machine she had to begin selling it herself...quite successfully).  Those inventions seemed to have appeared forty years ago, not a hundred and forty years ago.  Time has seemingly become distorted and passed so quickly, much as my life.  Ah, but there I go thinking in linear terms again.

    Old-young, left-right, child-parent.  Beliefs, moods, and personalities all change and yet stay the same.  History becomes history in our way of thinking.  Past-present-future.  Soon we might all be nothing but bones, our species gone and fossilized, waiting to be unearthed by another "arrival" species, one digging and finding just pieces of a puzzle that appear to have little differentiation.  The memories, the stories, the scattered tales will all be gone, still buried and still waiting to be discovered.