It’s a fact of life that older people bore the crap out of younger people. The polite ones will nod and smile and quietly wish you dead while you drone on about your first stadium concert (that your uncool dad drove you to and sat in the parking lot for five hours while you drank apple wine and puked all over the bleachers), or when you got high with your Eng. Lit. teacher (who turned out to be just a lonely old perv).
What young snotties don’t get is, they, too, will be old bores to their kids. Their photos – now Instagrams, now TikToks – will embarrass their children - if they deign to have them.
Embarrassing one’s children is 5000 years old (though I, for one, would love to know how paleolithic parents dealt with the offspring eye roll when Primative Dad slogged into the cave with a dead beast and said “Can someone stop with the wall drawing and help me with this?”
Eh, I don’t mind, much. Children with sense love the stories of their grandparents. My two would listen to their fraternal grandfather and his astonishing WWII experiences (you’ll know more later, including his involvement at the Nuremberg Trials). They would sing by the pool with my mother on guitar - a diminutive (and vastly slimmer) brunette Queen Victoria pretending to be Maria Von Trappe. Dad was a suave David Niven type whose army experience post Boston University was akin to Rob Petrie’s, but that didn’t make him any less fierce: I have a photo album of him in mustard gas gear (that was still a weapon in the mid-50s; no, he didn’t sleep under a German tank when he was 15, like my father-in-law, but, then again, he was an American). And my mother-in-law was emotionally wounded by Nazis and the Soviets and still managed to live a long, full, loving life. She was an artist who was never allowed to be, but she passed her talents on to her son and grandchildren.
So. When I wrote this series, I was thinking about all of those dear, dismissed people.
A little heavy? Well, humor can do that.
One of your best. I have always been amazed that in our youth, we all believed that we wouldn’t age.