I'm told that we were very quiet and well-behaved kids. Our parents would take us somewhere, and we'd just sit on a couch (or, as they said in Canada, on a "Chesterfield"), playing quietly. We didn't produce noise. We didn't run around.
Today, I was at my nephew's birthday party. Good grief. You don't see kids being quiet and well-behaved much anymore. I almost never see that. The kids are nice, but they seem never to stop running around and they seem endlessly driven by impulses. They don't seem to remember anything I tell 'em.
But I'm getting used to it.
These kids always seem to want to wrestle me to the ground. Or I'm supposed to toss 'em around for hours.
I seem to still have some "kid" inside me. I connect with little ones.
Even Annie was quiet and polite. Yep.
Unless it was just the two of us.
She was a year older than me and she tended to dominate. There are many family stories about her little schemes and minor misadventures. There are few about me. I was a very quiet, good kid, they say. Never got into trouble.
We had good parents.
I was a very shy kid. That stayed with me.
I learned how to interact with people. But, inside, I'm still that shy kid, uneasy with strangers.
Annie is notoriously gregarious. Still.
She makes lots of friends.
I find most of them to be annoying.
Annie's always saying something. Mostly, I say nothing.
Even now.
I listen to people nowadays, and it is as though they are members of a talkative foreign culture.
I am drawn to the outdoors or to an empty room. Silence. It says nothing false.
It has struck me recently, all at once, that my life is now long enough that parts of it occurred "a long time ago." When I was a kid, I thought the forties were a long time ago: an era utterly eclipsed by two decades of change. Now, twenty years ago (1990) seems like yesterday.
Don't feel old though. Feel more or less as I did in, say, 1975.
And you?
4 comments:
"Now, twenty years ago (1990) seems like yesterday.
Don't feel old though. Feel more or less as I did in, say, 1975. And you?"
I could write an essay on this subject. It is for me as it is for you, and I can't stop marveling at it. At one time, when I heard professors say they'd been at the University for 20 years or even 30, or that they'd done something 20 years ago, part of me would cringe and feel embarrassed for them. How could they be willing to reveal their dinosaur status, not to mention pure age (which one could deduce, roughly)? Now, I find myself saying those things all the time. I even know how it must strike my students--and somehow I don't care. I guess in that way, I have changed.
But I find it so cruel that one can feel just as one did decades ago, inside, and yet not have the same body or sexual appeal or energy or fitness that one did then. One can do one's best on the fitness score and all the rest, but there are limits....
Sometimes, when I go walking in the hills of Montana, I feel just as I did when I was 20--or so it seems, at least. Feel like a kid inside, with endless possibilities open. But then, sometimes, my back really hurts when I get back down. D'OH!
This is one reason I love the show "Cold Case" (the fictional one): they flash back and forth showing people in their youths and later. It drives home the fact that these really *are*, in many cases, the same person.
It is a cruel, cruel world--or does this simply reveal my lack of wisdom and inability to accept aging? It's both, of course.
MAH
I'm trying to slow time down to a crawl. It took me five minutes to write this sentence.
I'm so old I remember shampoo being sold in glass bottles.
Shampoo in glass bottles!
I feel the same and don't realize how much things have changed.
Beautiful post.
Post a Comment