CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith from the Heart of Winter for the Years of Winter… ©
I am reading a book on
health for older people. It’s a good book. I’m learning from it. But the author
likes trees, and he has learned a great deal about them, sometimes traveling
great distances to do so. He cannot resist putting into this book all the tree
knowledge he has learned. In writing, it’s called “an information dump.”
There is no logical place
in this book to talk about trees. They have nothing to do with the health
concerns of older people, but that has not stopped the author. He has put in
everything he knows about trees and tried to justify it by saying, at the end
of several pages, that just as the weather-beaten look of old trees indicates
wisdom, there is nothing wrong with old people looking old.
Writers and old folks are
similar that way. Some writers cannot resist showing you everything they have
learned in their research, whether it fits or not. Some old people cannot
resist telling you everything they have learned in their many years, whether
you are interested or not. For short, we call it TMI: Too Much Information.
We geezers should know
better than to engage in, and indulge in, TMI. We are old enough to remember
TV’s Sgt. Joe Friday, who always intoned, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Perhaps we old people are
so voluble because we don’t have many occasions to talk to real people.
When we were working, when
the kids lived at home and we attended their games and concerts and teacher
conferences, when there were parties and neighborhood gatherings, we had plenty
of chances to chat. We didn’t have to say at one time everything we know.
Now, especially if we live
alone, how often do we talk to someone? Our friends and family send us emails.
Even the banks and car companies that want our business and the politicians who
want our vote use robots to call us on the phone. If we call some business, an
automated voice tells us to press different numbers so we can be ignored in the
appropriate way. We don’t go to work, but the neighbors do, so even walking
down the street, we aren’t likely to see someone to talk to.
It’s no surprise, then,
that when the cashier at the grocery or the library lady says “Good morning,”
we think she is asking about our grandchildren and wants to know what we
thought about the snow storm of 1963. We readily supply TMI.
Some old people solve this
dilemma by seeking out other old people to talk to. After all, they have plenty
of time to listen. That’s a poor solution, though, because other old people
don’t want to listen; they want to talk. And they can be so borrring, telling us way more than we need to know.
I think the obvious answer
is a time-honored tradition of old people–talking to ourselves. Who better to
listen to? Who could possibly listen to us with more eagerness? Anything we say
is never TMI; it’s always just the right amount.
JRMcF
johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com
I tweet as yooper1721.
I have often extolled my
old friend, Walt Wagener, as one who is expert at “blooming where he’s
planted.” Once when I did so, Helen said, “I want to bloom BEFORE I’m planted.”
So I started writing a book of meditations for old people, sort of like my book
for cancer patients. I called it BLOOM
BEFORE YOU’RE PLANTED. I was never able to get an agent or publisher to be
interested in the idea, though, so I’m now using some of the “chapters” for
that book in this blog.
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