I live in a college town. It's not every day that I run into an old person, and it's not every day that I talk to an old person. Heck, I only call my parents about once a week! Simply put, me and the elderly do not cross paths very often, and they do not make a huge impact on me.
But this past week, there were three occurrences where my heart was touched by the hand of an old geezer, and dang it, it meant something. So I wanted to briefly go over the power of these handful of experiences and share the little that it meant to me,
1.
(There actually isn't a moment in the entire book where it mentions Morrie and Mitch are sitting on a bench together)
I randomly bought this book for 5 dollars at a used book store back in January. The reasoning was that I remember my brother reading it once and mentioning that a sports journalist wrote it. So I was like, "Why the heck not?"
Well, it turns out this book is awesome, and not because it has to do anything with sports. I read it in about 7 hours. Morrie Schwartz has a story that isn't normally found in a bestseller. But he is an outstanding person. I think MitchAlbom nicely constructs the reader's internal conflict when reading this book, which I jotted down in my journal. "I think we all have a person like Morrie in our lives, or at least want one. Then again, I think the idea is to be like him."
I enjoyed how Albom made Morrie's lifestyle just as transcendent as it was practical. Like, yeah I know this is what I should feel, but it also seems too extreme to work. If Albom came across any more theatrical or moralized, it would have taken away from the story's power. Kind of interesting how those things work sometimes.
2.
I started working at a call center where no one calls you. Sounds pretty great, right? The company, CaptionCall, helps the hard of hearing, and deaf, use the phone. They send or receive a call, it gets triangulated to me, and I dictate whatever is being said, which will show up on the client's screen. My wife says I'm a professional eavesdropper. She's not wrong.
Now I'll go ahead and say the obvious: about 99% of the hard of hearing are also on AARP. For most of the day I listen to old people talk to each other, and 3 things have hit me.
1- old people love their Jeopardy. 100% serious. Don't call them when Alex Trebek is onscreen.
2- Just because you're collecting Social Security doesn't mean you stopped being a jerk to your friends at times.
3- Geriatric depression is real, and it cones out the most in family scenarios. Like, I know people my age often say they don't want to get old, but some old people don't want to be old either. And when it comes to illness--dementia, Alzheimer's, depression--it gets harder to conceal what's going on underneath.
I don't I realized how prominent this is. I'm definitely not saying every call I field has a paranoid senior complaining about life to their exhausted child, but it happens more than once a day. I experienced some of this as a missionary; I would visit retirement homes or an elderly person far away from their family and get caught in their orb of loneliness to the point where we could never leave, even if they could care less about our message. Even then, I didn't get the same response as some of their family members do.
I suppose in this case, I should play the role of Mitch. Mitch saw past feeding off of Morrie's happiness and instead walked him to the bitter end. Morrie is the center of the book, but Mitch wrote it. That book has become more valuable than Morrie's primetime television interviews. If I'm Mitch, I'm giving what I can, even if I don't have it all yet.
3.
On Saturday Ashley and I hiked through Rock Creek Canyon. at the entrance, a man, most likely in his late 60s, asked if he could take our picture and send it to us. We obliged, and he construed a nice but dated Nikon. He snapped a few pictures, and got down my email. He'll be sending them shortly.
As we walked up the trail, I heard him stop more people. He actually stopped anyone he could. He was always smiling and happy to take photos of families, couples, and kids.
The photos aren't that great, but the man was. On a Saturday afternoon, he is spending his time collecting memories for strangers, no strings attached. He was simply a nice man, and you don't get that very often. That's what I liked so much about him, he just wanted to see other people happy.
He was still there when we came back. We smiled, waved, and then I decided to talk to him. I think most people would let a man like that talk to them, but I wanted to talk to him, and that's a pretty fundamental difference for two very similar things. He turned out to be very nice and knowledgable about the trail, and even corrected our mistake--we reported we saw mountain goats, and they were actually bighorn sheep (looks like all those years of watching animal planet didn't work out for me).
We said goodbye and I'm anticipating the photos, but wow, that was a wonderful experience for me. In my own life, I saw a flash of Mitch and a lot of Morrie, and it made me feel much more optimistic about things. So I thank you, Geriatric community, for giving me more happiness in life, and reminding me that a generation gap doesn't mean that you're a world away.
No comments:
Post a Comment