Do you remember when you were young? Like REALLY young? Birthdays were special, days to look forward to. Days that were all about you with the gifts and the cake and the party and the well-wishes. Getting older was something to anticipate back then.
Funny, this seems to last until our twenties, this feeling that you’ll just continue getting older forever, and nothing will ever change. At twenty, however, you start realizing that the next “step” is thirty . . . and that changes how you look at things a little bit. Mainly because as a teenager, thirty is really old, right? By the age of thirty, many adults are already falling behind the inevitable march of technology in favor of other interests, and only the true gadget-heads maintain that child-like amazement with every new invention to hit the streets. I know as a thirty-year-old, I was still writing letters . . . and mailing them through the postal system. With pens, paper, stamps, envelopes, and everything!! Oh the folly!!
Then you cross thirty . . . and the realization of what’s coming punches you in the face. Next step is forty. The big four-oh. And you start making out wills and buying clothes that “look good surrounded by pine” so that your funeral will be a nice event. Because if thirty is really old, then at forty, most folks must be walking around expecting to drop dead at any moment! Don’t laugh, think back to your time as a teen-ager and hearing that somebody you just met was over forty. You always kind of wanted to ask them if they’re feeling okay . . . every five minutes or so!
So you get to be forty, and realize the once fine-tuned machine that was your body, isn’t exactly holding up as you thought it would. Granted, you’re well aware the warranty on parts ran out years prior, but still, like the old Ford in the garage, you held out hope that things would keep working the way they should. And then, of course, comes the realization that the next big birthday step is . . . sigh . . . fifty.
Fifty. Half a century. That magical age where you’ve seen whole cycles of human history play out before you on a dazzling array of technological conveyances. That age where you imagine all of life just makes sense. The age of wizards. That age beyond which the wizened elderly amongst us have realized that the most important thing in life is the growing of a simple blade of grass . . . very zen-like, perhaps, if it didn’t spark an over-whelming urge to yell at kids to get out of their yard.
Well, I’m now forty five. And due to several knee operations in high school, combined with a couple decades of Army life, I generally feel about sixty. This is truly unfortunate as my mind and spirit remain fixed somewhere between eight and twenty depending upon the day and who you ask! This disparity between physical and mental conditions causes me to do stupid things . . . which generally exacerbate the run-down of my “laughably beyond warranty” body. I continue to run—‘cause the Army makes me—but I ride bike a lot more than I used to. It’s a great substitute for running that should be saving years of wear on my knees, except that riding bike introduces another source of potential pain, the crash. Worse, perhaps, as I ride mostly in Korea and Japan (both of which seem at times to have more cars than people!) these crashes often involve cars. For the record—and in case you’re wondering—that hurts!! A LOT!!!
So even attempting to mitigate other aches and pains, I find myself incurring more of them in what seems to be a vicious, never-ending cycle. I suppose the best thing for me would be to simply force my brain to catch up with my body, but this has down-sides as well. Already I find myself struggling to deal with emerging technologies as well as some that have been around for a while. I’m good with physical technology, but admit to having a hard time understanding the seemingly unlimited applications of social media and how kids today communicate. You want to see something funny? Watch me plan, coordinate, gather resources, and execute a Twitter post. Yeah, I know . . . the kids just tweet.
But that’s the way these things seem to go. I remember—and many of you might too—helping my Grandfather set the clock on his VCR (for an explanation of what that is, contact me off-line and I’ll gladly provide the history lesson!). He was so proud I was able to understand and overcome what he saw as a technological barrier. And I was glad to help my Grandfather, but at the same time couldn’t help but wonder why he’d found the task so difficult to understand in the first place.
It wasn’t until I hit my mid-thirties that the study of history sort of took on a new meaning for me personally. That’s essentially when I had that moment of clarity and finally understood. When my Grandfather was born, the television had yet to be invented. News came from a radio, phone calls went through a human switch-board operator, and people actually read newspapers . . . on paper! That’s quite a jump in technology and lifestyle in one lifetime, and I can only assume that sense of everything changing so fast only gets worse as you get older.
For me, I remember playing “Pong” on a black-and-white television sporting the most ungainly and unreliable “rabbit ear” antenna system. I also remember visiting a cousin’s house and seeing a “modern" video game for the first time in my life. Watching the original Atari “Space Invaders” would leave today's kids wondering what was wrong with the TV, perhaps, but back then, this was borderline magic and I was enthralled by it. But my tech gap isn’t limited to TVs and video games as I still own both VHS and cassette tapes (don’t ask me why!) and maintain a large collection of glossy, print photographs. BOXES of them!!!
I also remember playing with my friends. We played outside (gasp!!!), sometimes even getting dirty! So things change, perhaps, as a trip through most sub-divisions will attest. “Playing football with friends” today often means a group of young boys and girls crowded around a big, flat-screen TV connected to a console gaming system that puts our old Pong and Atari boxes to absolute shame. Showing my age again, these days—through the magic of Al Gore’s internet— they don’t really even need to be in the same room, town, or country to share a game. Still, I have to believe that the experience of making friends at that age—and the deeper joy in running across them later in life—will remain a fundamental part of the human experience no matter how technologically distant we become.
As old fogies, prone to outbursts of concern for yard maintenance, it’s difficult for us to imagine a “friend” that you’ve never met, and most of us would never use that term for such a person. Yet for the kids today, this is normal, and for all that we like to rag on the younger generation for their inability to communicate, that same kid can, with the touch of a few flat-screen icons, reach millions of people around the world in the blink of an eye. Isn’t that communication? When you think about it, isn’t that amazing? A little scary too, perhaps, but still, this is where we are today.
So maybe, rather than whining about what the next generation can’t do as well as we did, we should remember where it is that they started and understand why they are the way they are. Maybe then we can learn to better appreciate what they CAN do, and find ways to put those new skills and abilities to use in ways that benefit our communities and society at large. Every generation has something to offer, and each must find its place in the society into which they were born. Like it or not, we won’t live forever, and the world will be in their hands . . . and they’ll be the ones complaining about the next generation.
As for me, I’m gonna spend the next twenty minutes tweeting those noisy kids to get out of my yard!
M. G. Haynes