I am in my
eighth decade and getting more absent minded.
Yesterday I put together a bread; and when the bell rang on the bread-maker
I took out the dough and realized I had not mixed in the yeast.
Last night I
made a fish chowder: sautéed onions, carrots, celery and garlic, put in two
bottles of clam juice, added diced potatoes, a hand-full of thyme, and cooked
until tender. Finally, poured in a pint
of Half and Half cream and a quarter-stick of butter. Then realized
the fish was still in the refrigerator. I had to add the salmon and halibut
late to the recipe. A fish chowder
without fish?
Ok, twice in
the same day: fuck me silly with a handy-billy. But I am not overly concerned.
Our brains are
computers and have a finite storage capacity in the hard drives. Some young people are just starting to fill
their hard-drives; some people will never fill them, and most of us are
overloaded at my age.
Before covid,
my wife and I would often go into the college cafeteria for a coffee and a
sandwich after our walk around town.
The young twenty-somethings would look at us dismissively. We were obviously below their level of competence, knowledge and
experience: old people.
Fifteen
years prior, these same young people were just learning not to crap their pants
and piss their beds. The spent the next seven
years learning to read, write, and retain some basic math and science facts. Their
last five years in school were consumed with the idea of sex, and trying to
figure how to put what in where. Now
they are in college and know everything - and old people are just in their way. But in reality, their hard drives are practically
empty.
I have done
everything these young people have done-plus.
I have lived in eight states; spent 13 years in the arctic and sub-arctic;
I have spent seven years deployed between Italy, Spain, Portugal, Azores, Bermuda, Cuba, Porto
Rico, Iceland, Vietnam, and Newfoundland; I have been to Turkey, Greece, Libya,
Scotland and England; I have almost a thousand military flight hours and have
been in two crash landings; I have been a winter-bush survival instructor,
Maine State Guide, a school teacher and a principal. I have canoed the Allagash
River and the Okefenokee swamps. I have
met thousands of people, and had thousands of experiences – many forgotten.
I don’t use
a cell phone, have a Face Book page, Tweet, play War Craft and video games; because I don’t care to. I don’t take make-believe parachute jumps with
virtual reality glasses – I have already done that in real life. And I definitely
get annoyed when Microsoft wants to download and update on my ten-year old
computer.
Young
people are not at fault. In reality this
is their world, and my time is past. But in their egocentricity they don’t realize my hard drive is
full and theirs are virtually empty.
Does it
bother me that I can’t always come up with the word I want to say, or forget to
put the yeast in the bread or the fish in the chowder? A little.
But that is the cost of a world of experiences I have lived.
All those
experiences are downloaded on my hard drive, and unfortunately there is not an optimize
button to sort and order all the data: so occasionally I am going to grope for
a word or forget to put the damn yeast in the bread. My hard drive is full. It
comes with the age . But this is still the best time of my life.
Did I run and
Am I tired?
the Ol’Buzzard
