Back In My Day...

The inverse correlation between my age and the supply of cool old people

There is an aspect of aging I’ve never heard anyone state and yet it seems to me obvious and irrefutable: As you grow older, old people get less interesting. Which is a considerable loss. Because, when I was a boy, old people were fascinating.

They were travellers from distant and exotic lands. Lands I could never visit. Lands they could never return to.

In that sense, they were more like refugees than tourists, and like refugees, their origins sometimes revealed themselves in the odd ways they dressed and spoke. Fedoras. Poofy dresses. Slang like “applesauce” or “23 skidoo” or “you’re all wet” — accompanied with a smile that suggested these words draw up memories of a homeland long gone.

Swing it, hep cats!

When I worked as a teenager in the Parry Sound library, a pair of very old sisters came in one day to donate old books. The librarian didn’t want them, understandably. I have some on my shelf to this day, including their father’s high school edition of Vergil’s Aeneid, inscribed with evident care by “Rankin Carefoot, Collingwood, Collegiate Institute, Ontario 1898-9.” The sisters invited me to their house to see if I was interested in some other books and I vividly remember a black and white snapshot on the wall of some fashionable manor with the latest roadster parked outside. It could have been the set for a film production of The Great Gatsby.

See what I mean? When I was young, all the old people were interesting. Rich or poor, it made no difference. Anyone who came from the exotic lands of the distant past was sure to have an interesting story or three.

My grandfather once pulled out a keyboard and asked if there was anything I wanted him to play. This being the mid-1970s, and me being a callow youth, I asked him to play “Happy Days,” by which I meant the theme song of the cheesy sitcom. But my grandfather started playing, and singing, Happy Days Are Here Again, a song whose relentless good cheer — “happy days are here again / the skies above are clear again / let us sing a song of cheer again” — made it a hit during the terrifying early years of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt made it the unofficial theme song of his 1932 campaign, and it was popular in Democratic circles for years after. Not that I grasped all this when I was seven, but I did get the sense that this was a glimpse into my grandfather’s lost homeland.

Or there was the frail old man who took a walk every morning at the same time, passing by my high school, where I was in Conrad van der Valk’s history class. One day the school held a Remembrance Day ceremony and as I shuffled into the gym I saw the old man was seated on the stage. When he was introduced, the principal mentioned a series of names — Passchendaele, Ypres, Vimy — that I recognized from the town cenotaph, next to the library. This wisp of a man had fought in, and survived, every major battle Canada fought in the First World War.

But as I’ve gotten older, startling moments like that became steadily rarer.

Maybe fifteen years ago, I interviewed a psychologist about some modern issue, we got to chatting, and he told me about being a psychologist in the US Army in the late 1950s and realizing that the military wasn’t psychologically screening people who handled The Bomb. One soldier threatened to blow up the base after his wife left him. So the psychologist leaked this information to a senator and eventually the military decided it should keep people who may crack away from nuclear weapons.

That was cool.

But now I’m a saggy, grey, middle-aged man and only the extremely old hold out any promise of tales from the exotic past.

Now your garden-variety old people are Baby Boomers. What have they got to offer?

Some will say they were at Woodstock. They weren't. And if they were, they spent most of their time looking for a bathroom. It’s just not that interesting. (Unless they took the brown acid. I do want to hear from anyone who took the brown acid.)

But the 1970s? Nixon, inflation, disco? That is not a strange and exotic land. That’s where I grew up. I know all the punchlines from WKRP in Cincinnati — “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!” — so I can do without Boomer nostalgia.

There are now retirees who pine for the Reagan era. That’s not interesting. It’s sad.

And it will only get worse.

An old codger going on about life “back in the 90s” should forever be a grizzled prospector talking about the Klondike gold rush. But no, soon, it will be me. Talking about Seinfeld.

“Hey, kids! Do you know what ‘yadda yadda yadda’ means? I’ll tell you about it. Kids?”

Ugh.

Here is a 1934 Associated Press story about a 109 year old woman who was a student of Franz Liszt (born 1811). They don’t make old folks like this anymore.