youth

              What To Do With Old Memories

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Years ago, when mom died, you all read about the 20 plastic totes of memories in the basement of her house. Pictures, articles, obituaries, birth announcements, first communions, wakes, and simple stuff like when the girls were photographed jumping rope in 1973 and the picture was printed in the paper. IN THE PAPER! In 1973! The old paper stuff feels important, historic, even if it is just two little girls and a rope on Embargo Street in Rome, NY…in 1973.*

The “Sorting of The Totes”, a family tradition since the Middle Ages**, resulted in mountains of memories and momentos being distributed to each totes’ primary focus. Each child, grandchild or miscellaneous stranger had their own tote. Mom made two for me, her favorite.  At the time of the distribution, we all probably did the same thing: took a quick look and put the tote(s) up on a shelf.

Eight years later, in 2024, in preparations to move to NY and recovery, both my totes were front and center in the back of the car. In April 2024, the totes were picked up, carried to the door of the apartment house, set down in the elevator to the second floor, picked up and carried into the apartment, and put on a closet shelf. For two years. I can’t remember the reason for recently pulling them down and going through them, but the event was mind-boggling. The totes are both a Pandora’s Box*** of—

Ai says opening Pandor’s Box “released all of the worlds’ sorrows: disease, old age, famine, jealousy, and death.” They came flowing out and spread all over the world. Mom’s totes aren’t like that, are they? Maybe. Looking at photos of people from The Past, with most being complete strangers, can cause sorrow, and most of the subjects of the photos and articles are dead, so, there’s that, too. Look how happy they were, how joyous, how young, and how invincible…jealousy? Envy? Relief? Foretelling future deaths? Even seeing my 3-year-old myself bundled up for an afternoon of roiling in the snow inspired the question of why we have to grow old, can’t we stay young, forever? Then there’s the journal mom kept when she visited Switzerland, lamenting the cold while admiring the beauty. Her words in her time, now in mine.

Bet you don’t know the end of the Pandora’s Box legend. I didn’t, until Ai recited the entire story. After “The Sorrows of The World” poured out and spread across the globe, there was one thing left in the box. Ai says it was trapped in the bottom, under everything else, and Pandora didn’t see it, at first: One last gift from the gods.

It was hope.

When you look at photos of generations of relatives and friends and strangers who are no longer on this plane of existence, when you see how bright and alive they were, you begin to wonder, to imagine how much of your life will be in a plastic tote, and how soon will it happen. The existential question is normal, human, and helped a great deal by the The Hope stuck in the box, but it is still a question.

Unlike the original sorrows flitting away into the world, what do I do, what do WE do with the totes and their contents?  The Memories. What happens if we burn them, throw them away, or cut them up? Does it affect those no longer here? Does it make them “more gone”?

Screw it. Lunchtime. Everything back in the totes and back to the shelf. Life will take care of them somehow, sometime. Sorry kids, it’s your problem, now.

            *Yes. Repeated for emphasis. Please get the point.

            **Not really. But it should be.

***Really a ceramic jar, but it was mistranslated early on and the mistake stuck for all of eternity. Read the entire legend, it is a “theodicy”, “an explanation of why there is evil, suffering, and death in a world that might otherwise be prefect.”

Impatience is a virtue?

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There was a time when life was full of running fast, driving fast, going to bed late, getting up early, drinking, and eating whatever was available*. And there was never enough time to do it all. School and work wasted so many hours. It was a time of adventures, mistakes, missteps, too many beers, not enough money, and occasional involuntary vomiting.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” somebody ** wrote in 1859. Is it different for young people in this century? In the 1960s and 70s there was a sense of uncertainty, unease, and nuclear doom. American cities were burning, young people were dying in Viet Nam and on college campus, and Richard Nixon was supposed to be our president. The uncertainty and unease led to an undefined certainty the world was not going to last much longer, prompting my generation to wonder if we’d make it past the age of 30. It was a time, and you can understand how it skewed our decision making about the future.

America in 2025 is reminiscent of that 20th century era.

While young people naturally thrive on chaos, they prefer it be of their own making, not from the governments who stockpile weapons so powerful if they all exploded at once we’d rocket to Mars…in pieces.  A young person’s rough day should be because they burned the candle at both hands, working hard in the day and playing hard at night, until they outgrew their own stupidity. But these days working and playing have been replaced by worrying, by an unlabeled anxiety used as inspiration for inaction (sic) of any kind. Unlike my father, who viewed and judged my generational cohorts as “troublemakers”, I see lethargy, inactivity, profound sorrow, and aimlessness in the current young generation. Especially in young men. It should be noted an old man does not have much contact with the young of any kind, anymore, but the driveway, backyard, and road games of our historical youth have now been replaced by the bright, colorful, toxic seductions of video games and on-line adolescent experimenting. The bullying of older students over younger students, historically performed and endured in real life by generations ***, is now an online phenomenon with markedly different and dangerous possibilities. Worse, when we played those “road games” like stickball, parents knew where we were and knew the risk: cars running us over and abrasions severe enough to need shorts and gauze for most of the year. The new youth can hide in the physical safety of their basement, their bedrooms, and even in the backseat of the car and enter unhealthy worlds and relationships without parents ever knowing, sometimes with emotional and bodily consequences too hideous to contemplate even with proof of the carnage.

It may be the senior fondness for a re-painted Golden Age, but when the robots come, what next? Will the next generation of youth ever be young like we remember young? Or will they be…

As we, all adults, fight and scrap over macro terms like democracy, fascism, and preferred pronouns, the youth of this and succeeding generations will be watching and responding, looking for clues on how to live life and be happy. Is it even possible we can set an example?

*Yes. All before high school graduation. Parents trusted kids more, back then. Ironic?

**Made you look. I know who, but Ai wants me to put a semicolon after the first “times”. Was Dickens wrong to use a comma? I’m stickin’ with Dickens.

***I was both bullied and bully, as were most of us, except for the exceptional young people who had sense enough—and were lucky enough not to not get drawn into either. Those people became lawyers. Doctors, and politicians.

Personal Things. Look Away, if you can

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Older friends have been lamenting being older. Whenever I’m around these conversations…well…

But you can’t change life simply by ignoring it. It is true we change as we age. And especially if we want the impossible: to be left alone and never grow old.

Sadly, the only solution is to not be around “older friends.”

But younger friends…well…

This past Easter was spent with family around the table. Not one was within 20 years of my age. Conversations swirled around things and ideas I’d either never heard of or heard of over 50 years ago. The constant juxtaposition was astounding. It created a hole in the fabric of conversational time where my contributions appeared irrelevant, meaningless, unimportant, and so, unspoken. It was as if there was nothing to offer.

But…so what?

As a young man I never thought I was the center of the universe, but I did matter. Life progressed, things happened, and then life started to wind down. As the “winding down” happened, life was adjusted, tweaked, re-defined, but in small increments. It was healthy, like eating broccoli in small bites. Anywhere the body was, the body adjusted and found ways to exist with some measure of happiness. Purpose, fate, bad luck, God, none of it was ever questioned for a purpose or an expected explanation. The main reason for the acceptance of change was there was lots more time to live, lots more to accept, lots more to adjust to…years more opportunity for hope and improvement.

So, imagine the surprise when you suddenly realize there is no longer “lots more time to live”.

This isn’t about death. For us as young people, death is a far-off rumor with an import never understood until you can figuratively see the whites of its eyes, and the realization it is inevitable takes a little of the sting out of the realization it might be here. And we hope it’s happening is a peaceful event.

But…does it sound like fun wondering if Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) will eventually make you blind and unable to curse the Yankees? Or if a small muscle in the anus (the sphincter) will stop working and make diapers a part of your old age fashion? Is “dribbling” in your future? (Look it up, but for the “non-sports” definition.) Will the bad kind of plaque (Oxford’s good definition: “an ornamental tablet, fixed to a wall in commemoration of a person or event.”) render all these worries moot? Cognitive impairment: a blessing in disguise? Who knew? Even worse, under a certain age who ever thought about it?

Death, then, is not feared as much as slowly, incrementally, dying.

As young people we may have accepted the inevitability of death, but did anything or anyone ever prepare us for the inevitability of “dying”, losing parts of ourselves as if on some sinister, sad, stupid schedule? And without “lots more time to live”?

Give me death when it’s my time but please, fate, stop chipping away at life. I’ll die in peace, without complaint, if God will let me, but if there are other plans, that “schedule”…I’d rather not know.

Crap. That means avoiding old folks who want to talk about it.

Eh. I can live with it. At least until the damn beta-amyloid builds up.**

** Hope you researched the correct “plaque”.