#276 Lessons of Life

Age is perception. The word befuddlement is usually used with older folks. And curmudgeon and cranky. Wild-eyed youth has nothing if not impatience, so the plodding ways of their elders seem like the great social impediment. Oldsters are at a loss to understand. Like what does it mean when your teenage daughter throws away all her old clothes cause they’re too small. But the new clothes she come home with from the mall are even tighter? What is that?
Oldsters get to be penny pinchers. I used to think it was the fixed income thing till I realized that here I was in the peak of my earning years and I was getting the same way. Perhaps it has something to do with perceiving the value of a dollar. Perhaps it has something to do with the value of a barrel of oil. Perhaps as you get older and you see your body’s own personal resources dwindling, it becomes all too apparent that the world you live in has limited resources as well. And so you start to conserve. Or you start to hoard. Hoarding is the “me first” strategy of world domination—there’re only twelve donuts left, I’m grabbing ten of them. Conserving is just using things wisely—if we all eat a tenth of a donut a day they should last till we can think up a way to make new donuts.
Perhaps we are impatient with youth and its profligate squandering of what we view as valuable resources. Is it any wonder we see someone spending to the max on all their credit cards, living is a small place so they can at least partially afford a giant TV to put in it, and going over into cellphone overtime extortion minutes, that we say those people need to grow up. When we see people spending and living like there’s no tomorrow we know they’re not old enough to appreciate that tomorrows are indeed extremely limited.
So I find myself doing old folks things. I fill up my tank on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. Last weekend’s price-gouging has tapered off and the next weekend reaming has yet to begin. I plan out a menu, shop from a list, and go to the store only once a week. I look down when I walk and find an occasional quarter. I go around the house turning off lights and televisions and the standby mode on my DVD player. Does it cost more energy to burn a green “standby” light or a red “off” light? I pour smaller cups of coffee so I don’t have to microwave it back to temperature as much. I pick up Costco water bottles. My children used to leave half-empty glasses of water in every room in the house. It frustrated me that now they leave half-empty bottles of Costco water all over the house. But age brings wisdom. The kids are in too much of a hurry to notice if the seal is already broken on the cap. So I just refill the bottles and put them back in the cardboard semi-case. Oh yeah, that’s another word they use for old people, cagey.
America, ya gotta love it.