My epiphany started with my front door and my washer and ended with me putting a knee brace on a freshman. OK, admit it…you’re curious where the heck this is going, right? Stick with me, kid, I won’t let you down.
So my washer, which gets more use than a public toilet at a NASCAR event, started emitting a particularly foul odor every time we started the wash cycle. It got worse. Now, I’m a pretty smart guy, published author and all that, but when it comes to certain practical skills, I’m about as useless as tofu in a tiger cage; therefore, my reaction was to assume the washer wasn’t level, because I know how to level things. Didn’t work. So, my next step was “What smell? I don’t smell anything,” because, as I may have mentioned, my USEFUL knowledge cupboard is pretty bare. Enter my 71 year-old mom, who walked into the house and asked why my laundry room smelled like Medusa’s underarms. “What smell?” I inquired. Instinctively, she knew how to create a Dumbledore-ian mixture and run it through the wash/rinse cycle two times with no clothes and – BOOM – fresher than unicorn farts. My mother did this effortlessly, her only fuel a steady diet of water and pretzels.
As it would happen, that same week, the lock on my front door started to catch/jam to the point where, at times, you would almost dislocate your shoulder trying to get out of the house. My repair method? “Put your back into it! It’s only a door handle, for Pete’s sake!” Enter my 73 year old father, resident Encyclopedia Stepannica of useful information; hence, the antithesis of his 46 year-old son. The second he felt that the lock was operating anything less than perfectly, the tools came out. He has tools within reach at all times, a product of having lived a life that required resilience, resourcefulness and – say it with me – USEFUL KNOWLEDGE.
“This won’t do,” he decided, in between a steady diet of coffee and cigarettes, “what if Dawn or the kids need to get out of the house in a hurry?” (I’m editing here, folks. Dad’s got a potty mouth when he’s pissed; in this respect, at least, we’re very similar.) He took the entire mechanism apart, reassembled it properly, repaired and WD-40d it. Works like new.
I would have bought a new lock.
And probably a new washer.
I’m guessing you all have older folks like these two in your orbit – freakin’ metaphorical “MacGyvers” that can fix the shed behind your house with old banana peels and a paper clip? Well guess what? Our senior citizens know a hell of a lot more than that, kiddies, and it would serve us well to stop treating them like burdens and start paying attention TO them, learning FROM them and, to be honest, being more LIKE them.
re·source (n.) – 1. something that a country has & can use to increase its wealth 2. a supply of something (such as money) that someone has and can use when it is needed 3. a place or thing that provides something useful.
That sound about right? It sure does to me. Unfortunately, our society seems to have adopted the ass backward model that our senior citizens are disposable liabilities when, in fact, our elderly (and get this straight cupcake, elder is a term of respect,) are our most undervalued resource. The legendary John Wooden, himself a veritable tsunami of life changing action and advice during his 99 years on this Earth, asserted that “the divide between the young and the old could be lessened by more mutual trust and understanding of the other fellow.”
I concur wholeheartedly. To build upon that, our elderly and the plethora of life lessons they carry, could go a long way in repairing our fractured, directionless youth. These people survived World Wars, pandemics, a Depression and the Holocaust. They have BEEN there and DONE that; they WATCHED what we merely read about in our history books and kept it to themselves in an age when we seem obsessed with advertising even the most minor of “accomplishments.” Certainly, if nothing else, our seniors could teach us a thing or two about humility.
They could also teach us a lot about things that we seem to need so desperately these days. My earlier anecdotes were intended to be funny, of course, but they illustrate the simple point that our predecessors come from a time when everything had to last, a time when things (from appliances to clothes to relationships) weren’t viewed as disposable. Maybe we need to take all those people who waited in line for the iPhone 6 (many of whom had a perfectly good iPhone 5, many of whom were sipping $7 lattes and $5 water) and pair them up with someone who survived the Great Depression for an illuminating, and possibly life-altering conversation.
And speaking of conversation…about that knee brace.
I have a 9th grade student that is, shall we say, animated (Translation: can’t sit down and won’t shut up,) and she approached me – in the middle of class, mind you – and asked me to re-attach her knee brace because, and I quote, “my pop-pop did it but he don’t know what he doing.” After we discussed her grammar and the implications of a male teacher re-applying a female freshman’s brace, I asked her why she allowed her grandpop to do it every day if he “didn’t know what he was doing.” Her answer perfectly summarizes my point: “‘Cause I like listening to him talk. I feel smarter and better about myself when he’s done talking… He knows a lot and he don’t want [any]thing except to make the world better. He’s wise, you know? ”
I know.
We all should know.
