My friend Harry has reached a certain age. No longer does
he reliably recognize the names of celebrities or the models of automobiles.
Harry has not lost his marbles. He still reads his mail
and pays his bills correctly. He greets friends and family by right names. He
does not grocery shop in his bathrobe. He has never worn a tinfoil hat.
In a sense, Harry has simply been left behind. As he completed the daily orbits of his own life, the rest of life marched ahead. Familiar public figures retired or died. Norms changed in cultural vocabulary, even in the pervasive vernacular of marketing. Eventually, in a moment of epiphany, it dawned on Harry that the larger world had a name for his world: Yesterday.
This does not greatly discomfit him. By and large, he liked yesterday well enough. However, he does have to deal with moments of nuisance.
Some of these come to in the grocery store checkout line. We've all waited there, while the person ahead disputes a sale price or searches endlessly for the only credit card that will do. And we've all passed this time by glancing over the tabloid sheets and personality magazines.
From them we learn who is pregnant and who wants to be. We learn who is making a giddy commitment to marriage and who is departing it broken-hearted or righteously outraged.
We are invited to consider a singer's political opinions. We are offered an actor's definition of social responsibility.
The pictures and stories are predicated, presumably, on assumptions that we care about the people featured. Harry, however, does not. Rather, he leaves the grocery line with a feeling he's been hectored by post-adolescent strangers.
He is colorful in annoyance: Some millionaire rocker who looks like he slept in a dumpster is plagued by existential ennui? Give me a break!
Harry's episodic issues with mavens of marketing involve tone-deafness.
Theirs.
As usual, he is colorful: Look what they've done with the models of cars. The names ought to suggest something about style and juice. Impala. Charger. I saw one the other day called a Tucson. Know what that makes me think of? Cactus. Why the hell should I want a car that reminds me of cactus?
Harry says age gives him license to be cranky. And he enjoys it. He admits as much in moments of candor. He calls it therapeutic as well: Grumbling about stuff that doesn't really matter diverts him from brooding about things he can't change.
Thus he doesn't rail against the diminishment that creeps steadily in with the years. It comes to everything alive, he says. I saw a guy say it once on TV: "Everything has a shelf life, except Velveeta cheese." Another guy -- a writer -- said being born is the most dangerous thing there is. The eventual mortality rate is 100 percent.
Harry and I enjoy meeting over beer from time to time. When he's had a couple, he becomes downright philosophical.
Know why writers call aging a journey? It's because, when you reach a spot way down the road, you can see things you wouldn't see if you hadn't made the trip. And of course stuff happens to you as you travel. One of the things I can see better now? Prejudice. Because it happens to me. I experience it personally. Some people look at me and see old white guy, and they think they know everything they need to. They don't mean me any harm, particularly, but it's like I'm not really there as far as they are concerned. Just some image they brought along with them.
Harry says this is a symptom of a societal mistake. He says that with the modern convention of labeling generations, we've institutionalized prejudice. Actually legitimized it.
You hear it all the time. Generation X does this. Generation Y does that. People who wouldn't dream of stereotyping by race pigeonhole millions of others with a phrase. And you know what else? If you take a real look at the labels, there's a wide streak of unkindness in them.
Harry says aging also has taught him to pay better attention to the people who matter in his life -- the ones he'd miss if they were gone. He means friends and family, of course. But he also specifies the kind of people you never meet but who nonetheless make a difference in the way you see the world.
You know one of the people I miss? Mother Teresa. I never thought about her much, but she was always there, sort of at the corner of your eye, with her example of courage and reverence. You don't see a lot of those in daily life, especially reverence. It's good for there to be someone who reminds us about the best that human beings are capable of.
And I say that without being a churchgoing type. I think religion would have a lot more success with people if it weren't for the damn churches. Half of them want to control you, and all of them want your money. I'd take 'em a lot more seriously if they sold all their fancy buildings, gave the money to poor people, and set up shop in pole barns.
Now, all that being said, there's something to think about if you try to look past the churches and see into the heart of the thing. There's some pretty special moral wisdom in the Bible. If you want to get the notion of it, just consider turning the ten commandments upside down: You must lie. You must steal. You must murder.
The world wouldn't work. Life wouldn't work. The human race wouldn't work. See?
I once asked Harry about the people who say that Christianity is the only right road. What about all the perfectly good people who are on a different one?
He snorted: If God wants to whisper in Buddhist ears, too, seems to me that's up to Him. Some windbag preacher in a thousand-dollar suit's not gonna make me think ill of it.
Even after a couple of beers, Harry's appetite for deep thinking is finite. He is apt to wind up with another riff on grocery lines or car models.
I was at a stoplight, and the car in front of me was called a Yaris. Yaris! Sounds like a Tibetan cow. Ever see a picture of one of those things? They're ugly as hell. Of course, so are a lot of the cars these days. I saw one, looked like they put wheels on a Kleenex box...
Harry's wife says she can't decide if she should describe him as a grouchy optimist or a cheerful realist.
Depends on the day, she says ...
And whether he's been to the grocery store.
