And Then She Added…

One of my readers has reminded me that there is in fact a real audience for the stories and tales of older people, which can serve later as a reservoir of the bandwidth of understanding: young kids and grandkids.   And he’s right. If you don’t believe me, go find yourself a copy of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.  I replied to him:

I hope you didn’t — or don’t — stop telling them stories!  Kids love to hear stories from grandparents (they are not like the impatient early middle agers (30′s and 40′s are the worst, with some late 20′s mixed in).  I loved hearing stories from my grandparents, and my Dad, too, when I was a kid.  It’s only later that the stories-ennui seems to set in…  I feel like I’m something of a time machine, because I had a step-grandfather who was born in 1865 (!!!!) and he used to tell me stories from his life…  as did all my other grandparents and parents as and when they could.

Those are stories I value now, and wish I could hear more of.

It’s the opposite of magic tricks.  Kids aren’t taken in my magic, but grownups are; kids are willing to listen to grandparents’ and parents’ stories, but as grownups we lose the ‘wanna’ for a while…

So please, please, for their benefit and your pleasure, keep telling those stories to the grandkids as long as they’ll listen!

A Side Effect Of The Passage Of Time

From our recent correspondence:

[My friend is] also the person who has known me longest and most closely who is still alive — and therefore with whom I have the greatest communication bandwidth: a few words get across a great deal of meaning (i.e., I don’t have to stop and explain things to him: he was there, or already knows of them, and a word or two suffices to refer to all that).  As you get older, having to explain things or else risk being misunderstood (or ignored) gets to be more and more of a strain on conversation, complicated by the current trend of no one listening to anything, no matter who is talking, for longer than 10 seconds at a time — and you’re lucky to get that much.

Eventually, not many people much younger than you are care what you have to say, even when you know it’s vitally important, for them as well as for you — and, all too often, those few who do aren’t willing to go through all the background explanations that are required to bring them up to speed to actually hear and understand your intended meaning. Inevitably, some of those explanations take the form of recalled events or anecdotes from your past, at which point some people inevitably decide (erroneously) that you’re living in the past or starting to ‘lose it.’

So, after a while, you start really missing the people who can actually hear what you’re saying — or who are interested enough to wait around long enough  — a minute or two? — for you to finish saying it.