The young, purposeful woman sitting next to me in the café busied herself crocheting a new carrying bag.
She couldn’t be more than 25, and might be more likely to be reading about accessories in a hip fashion magazine than making them. As she worked the intricate loops with her hook, I was transfixed.
“Where did you learn that?” I asked.
“From my grandmother when I was five-years-old,” she answered proudly. “It’s the kind of thing somebody else has to teach you — it’s hard to learn from a book.”
As I reflect on this beautiful art passed down through generations, I think of my parents. My father will be 80 in a few months and my mother just turned 76. My mom had a full-on stroke a couple of years ago, and dad had a narrow escape with a blood clot that passed harmlessly through his brain. I realize they will not be around forever, and I should take advantage of the time I have with them to learn everything I can from them.
However, I become so focused on my own problems and my own issues, sometimes I cannot fathom how they could understand the world I live in, the lifestyle I have made for myself. Other times, I just simply don’t make the time.
Then some major life event happens like my recent relationship breakup, and I am yanked from the depths of despair or confusion by their seemingly omniscient wisdom.
That’s when it occurs to me, I should try to spend more time with them, and try to get a little bit more of that wisdom out of them.
But why does it take such an event to make me do what seems like a no-brainer — to learn from those who have already learned how to live in a million ways that I need to know about.
When I was teenager and obsessed with all things young, I passed up amazing opportunities, where I looked right through some of the most incredible people I ever met, while delivering prescriptions for my local drugstore to nursing homes. For example, the former famous Ziegfeld Follies dancer who could only hold my attention for the minute or two I was there to make a delivery.
Or, like the World War II veteran, one of Ike’s (future President Eisenhower) aides, whom I hurried past on my way out of the store so I could make it to a movie with my girlfriend.
Back then, I wasn’t even interested in my own grandparents, whose courageous tales of coming to America and their survival against the odds weren’t nearly as important as my own struggles and achievements.
Organizations like AARP have transformed the image and the plight of seniors in America. Yet, we still seem to see the older generation in a separate and reverent light at best. At worst, we see them as a burden, with their increasing healthcare needs, with the inevitable avalanche of social security benefits the aging baby boomer generation will collect and the like.
It should be obvious that we need to do everything we can for those who paved the way for the rest of us, to help and protect them from the pitfalls of financial and social hardship.
However, there also needs to be a greater awareness that seniors contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to our society each year in unpaid services, whether volunteering at their local church or hospital, helping friends and family members in their community, or just simply passing along their wisdom to the younger generation.
Ultimately, we should realize the great opportunity to capitalize on more of that with something that has never existed before in the history of mankind — a booming population of human beings that are living longer than ever before.
Those who have evolved past the petty physical needs, and selfish concerns of youth, know, feel, and understand humanity and the world, in a way that no young person ever can.
Not to mention, we could all learn how to crochet an awesome accessory or two!