Recalling? Those good old days
There’s this problem, you see. I can no longer remember many words I want to say while talking with other people, so I went to a doctor. He reassured me that for an otherwise healthy guy halfway through his seventies, my problem was cause for no alarm. He called it MCI--minor cognitive impairment--but offered no remedy. It’s just the aging process.
I got home, checked my computer, and saw this on the Internet:
“God grant me...The senility to forget the people I never liked;The good fortune to run into the ones I do, And the eyesight to tell the difference.”
That’s small comfort, as I can still plainly see friends patiently filling in the blanks for me in conversations. Luckily my problem in speaking hasn’t spilled over into my other faculties. Yet. If in my writing it does, I hope some editor will make sure you never notice it or else show me the door.
Moreover, I’m beyond worrying about temptation. “As you grow older,” Winston Churchill once noted, “it will avoid you.”
In any event, my musings in print have become increasingly reflective of my aging mindset in recent years, especi ally regarding the good old days. I suppose that also is normal, for people of my generation tend to express dismay over how fast things are changing nowadays, even when for the better.
The Internet is full of testimonials to how things used to be and how we were brought up to be much better citizens than what the younger generations are producing. Or so it seems.
They don’t have broadly shared experiences like we did, from the military draft, from widespread suffering and sacrifice occasioned by World War II, and by the thrill of eventual, unconditional victory. There were comparatively few of us to begin with, reflecting Depression impacts, and our ranks now are thinning rapidly.
No wonder we’re so grouchy: Unpopular wars, antiwar sentiments, unsatisfactory outcomes. Thank goodness we are finally succeeding, winning big in Iraq.
So it’s no surprise, while snorting over the sad state of entertainment today, that we still praise “Meet me in St. Louis,” Jimmy Stewart, Tommy Dorsey, Ike...I could go on and on. In our house, it’s also why we often prefer the old movies on TCM rather than much of today’s cable fare with its trashy dialogue and gore.
But what the heck. We may as well sit back and enjoy the rest of the journey. The Olympics were interesting. (But questions arose: How did those beach volleyball players keep the sand out of their cracks ?) Most of us seniors here in Stafford live pretty well and have the time to muse about such trivialities and play with the grandkids.
And as we have told the youngsters many times, they have it easy compared with when we were young. (Who ever heard of beach volleyball?)
One memorable event in my young life took a long time for me to appreciate its huge significance. When I was about 10 or 12, summer was starting out to be long and typically hot in my home in west Texas. We did have a few electric fans to create a breeze, and at church they passed out hand-fans to all the worshippers, and they helped a little.
Then my dad brought home a big boxed fan, one he installed in a window. This new-fangled thing had excelsior stuffed around it, and an automatic water line attached, to drip water down through the excelsior. He turned it on.
Magic! It was ding-nigh indescribable. It felt like standing in front of an opened refrigerator. I would just stand there until I got chilly. It worked great, thanks to our area’s prevalent low humidity. This first, cheap evaporative air cooler was an instant hit. I remember singing into the fan and hearing my voice sound all buzzy. Great fun.
Who could have known that advancing air conditioning and refrigeration technology would so rapidly bring great prosperity to the South, and turn Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Phoenix into boom towns that now far20outpace the older northern cities. Nowadays, why get excited over global warming when our homes are quite comfortable all summer?
But I digress. There are hundreds of fond memories I can still, yes, recall, such as--
* Keys--Skeleton, skate and church.
* Tires--although properly inflated, they’d blow out.
* Big 78 rpm records you could play backwards and get weird sounds, like much of today’s kinky music.
* Floor dimmer switch--you kept stomping your left foot until the stupid oncoming car dimmed his brights.
* Health--I grew up with lead-based paints, measles, bikes without helmets, .22 rifles and shotguns--and I was going to mention something else, too.
But enough. Finally, perhaps we fogies always appear grouchy because, as another Internet wit noted, “I was always taught to respect my elders, but it keeps getting harder to find one.”
I got home, checked my computer, and saw this on the Internet:
“God grant me...The senility to forget the people I never liked;The good fortune to run into the ones I do, And the eyesight to tell the difference.”
That’s small comfort, as I can still plainly see friends patiently filling in the blanks for me in conversations. Luckily my problem in speaking hasn’t spilled over into my other faculties. Yet. If in my writing it does, I hope some editor will make sure you never notice it or else show me the door.
Moreover, I’m beyond worrying about temptation. “As you grow older,” Winston Churchill once noted, “it will avoid you.”
In any event, my musings in print have become increasingly reflective of my aging mindset in recent years, especi ally regarding the good old days. I suppose that also is normal, for people of my generation tend to express dismay over how fast things are changing nowadays, even when for the better.
The Internet is full of testimonials to how things used to be and how we were brought up to be much better citizens than what the younger generations are producing. Or so it seems.
They don’t have broadly shared experiences like we did, from the military draft, from widespread suffering and sacrifice occasioned by World War II, and by the thrill of eventual, unconditional victory. There were comparatively few of us to begin with, reflecting Depression impacts, and our ranks now are thinning rapidly.
No wonder we’re so grouchy: Unpopular wars, antiwar sentiments, unsatisfactory outcomes. Thank goodness we are finally succeeding, winning big in Iraq.
So it’s no surprise, while snorting over the sad state of entertainment today, that we still praise “Meet me in St. Louis,” Jimmy Stewart, Tommy Dorsey, Ike...I could go on and on. In our house, it’s also why we often prefer the old movies on TCM rather than much of today’s cable fare with its trashy dialogue and gore.
But what the heck. We may as well sit back and enjoy the rest of the journey. The Olympics were interesting. (But questions arose: How did those beach volleyball players keep the sand out of their cracks ?) Most of us seniors here in Stafford live pretty well and have the time to muse about such trivialities and play with the grandkids.
And as we have told the youngsters many times, they have it easy compared with when we were young. (Who ever heard of beach volleyball?)
One memorable event in my young life took a long time for me to appreciate its huge significance. When I was about 10 or 12, summer was starting out to be long and typically hot in my home in west Texas. We did have a few electric fans to create a breeze, and at church they passed out hand-fans to all the worshippers, and they helped a little.
Then my dad brought home a big boxed fan, one he installed in a window. This new-fangled thing had excelsior stuffed around it, and an automatic water line attached, to drip water down through the excelsior. He turned it on.
Magic! It was ding-nigh indescribable. It felt like standing in front of an opened refrigerator. I would just stand there until I got chilly. It worked great, thanks to our area’s prevalent low humidity. This first, cheap evaporative air cooler was an instant hit. I remember singing into the fan and hearing my voice sound all buzzy. Great fun.
Who could have known that advancing air conditioning and refrigeration technology would so rapidly bring great prosperity to the South, and turn Houston, Dallas, Atlanta and Phoenix into boom towns that now far20outpace the older northern cities. Nowadays, why get excited over global warming when our homes are quite comfortable all summer?
But I digress. There are hundreds of fond memories I can still, yes, recall, such as--
* Keys--Skeleton, skate and church.
* Tires--although properly inflated, they’d blow out.
* Big 78 rpm records you could play backwards and get weird sounds, like much of today’s kinky music.
* Floor dimmer switch--you kept stomping your left foot until the stupid oncoming car dimmed his brights.
* Health--I grew up with lead-based paints, measles, bikes without helmets, .22 rifles and shotguns--and I was going to mention something else, too.
But enough. Finally, perhaps we fogies always appear grouchy because, as another Internet wit noted, “I was always taught to respect my elders, but it keeps getting harder to find one.”
posted by Ben Blankenship at
9:15 AM
