I’m sitting at a road stop diner in the middle of Oregon. The back of the t-shirt that the trucker in the booth ahead of me is wearing reads: “Some people are still alive simply because it’s illegal to kill them.” I’m wondering if I’m one of these people. It’s the last day of a crazy five-day road trip, a trip in which I traveled from my home in Portland, Oregon, back to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up. The specific catalyst for the trip was that my friend got me a ticket to see game three of the Oakland A’s American League Division Series Thumping of the Minnesota Twins. But as I approach Portland, to resume my regular life, I am full of marvel at the changes that have occurred among my friends from high school, and myself. We’re getting old. We’re not old yet, but I cannot deny the fact that my friends and I are well on our way to getting old.
So I’m a crotchety old man, I already knew this. I sit behind my tiny laptop screen, week to week, ranting and raving about how I don’t like certain changes in our world. Take text messaging, for example. A lot of my friends have recently become experts at using this new technique to communicate with their friends, and they even use fancy acronyms to expedite the communicative process. They look like they’re playing video games when they type to each other, their fingers nimbly typing lengthy messages to their friends in other countries, or at the other end of the bar. My least favorite of their acronyms is “LOL,” which means, “laughing out loud.” I don’t see why this is used in place of the simple, yet powerfully effective “Ha ha.” I’ve been trying to jump on the band wagon, and learn how to text, but I’m not very good at it. One problem that I have already encountered is that as I tried to text message my friends while driving 700 miles North on I-5 today, I almost swerved off the road in my efforts to spell check.
What’s strange about my aversion to text messaging is that I love to use the Internet, and I’m a huge fan of emailing. But this does me no good, because a lot of my friends who excel at text messaging don’t use email, and so we don’t keep in touch as well as we could, if I were to hone my text messaging skills. At any rate, all of this ‘getting used to new things’ makes me feel old. Why do my friends have to learn how to text? Why can’t they be stoic, as I wanted to be, and reject this new technology? Does my fear of text messaging analogize me to old men of the past, who feared the transition from propeller planes to jets, radio to television, or the telegraph to the telephone? LOL.
Long ago, back in the summer of ’99, my friends and I drank whatever was the cheapest, but also the most effective alcohol that we could get our underage hands on. (Effective alcohol is a term that refers to the measurement of a beverage’s alcohol content.) To this day, the fact remains uncontested that light beers have lower alcohol content than regular beers, thereby rendering them a less effective alcohol purchase. Well, another sign of my aging times is that my friends and I now drink mostly light beer, instead of effective beer. I’m not sure how this change in beer purchasing happened to so many of us, and at the same time, but as I looked around the room this past weekend, few, if any of my good old friends were chugging cheap malt liquor from a forty ounce bottle. But on the bright side, at least I didn’t see anyone sipping Coors Light and text messaging at the same time.
In high school, when my friends and I got together and drank, we would stay up as late as possible, and then fall asleep in sleeping bags at some random house. Nowadays, our aging and soon to be decrepit bodies value our own beds over the thrill of ‘getting wasted,’ so we moderate our consumption of booze, and even sometimes take time off between beers to drink water. I even properly hydrate myself before bedtime most nights, trying to lessen my morning hangover, instead of falling asleep in a drunken reverie, without so much as a care in the world for what the next day might bring.
I think that I’m an even older man than most of my friends are, even though I’m single, and most of my friends who graduated with me in 1999 are living and sharing rent in an apartment with a serious girlfriend (which means that they’re all married, in so far as I’m concerned.) I base this assessment on the fact that I seem to be one of the few people among my friends who turns down the chance to smoke pot, in order to stay more focused, more awake, and less paranoid. When I was younger those were symptoms of pot that only existed in anti-drug textbooks and propaganda.
The highlight of the trip was a chance to see the A’s play in the postseason, with my friend D-Day. D-Day is happily engaged, and teaching high school for his second year, so on paper, he sounds responsible. D-Day may be responsible, after all, he sincerely tries to reach out and educate his pupils, spending many after school hours planning lessons, but he’s still got his sense of youthful priorities right, because he called in a substitute teacher in order to make the 1:00pm opening pitch of the game on Friday. This made me believe, for a brief spell, that maybe we weren’t all getting too old and serious about our jobs. But after the game, I met a bunch of my friends to eat dinner at my favorite Mexican Restaurant, and discovered that in my old age, I can only consume three baskets of tortilla chips, instead of the usual five to six, and then the next day I actually had a ‘salsa-and-too-much-Mexican-food-hangover’ that lasted well past noon.
On the one day of the trip that I had some downtime, I decided to bite the bullet, and visit my hometown of Orinda. Most of my memories from growing up in Orinda are not pleasant. The town rubbed me the wrong way, and to this day, whenever I go to California to visit my friends from High School, I try to avoid passing through Orinda. This week, however, because of this ‘stupid self-imposed job’ (read: my column that I cherish), I decided to stop in Orinda, and let the memories roll. In a moment of youthful spontaneity, I visited the coffee shop that I stopped at each morning on my way to school.
After a seven-year hiatus, I returned through the same, familiar doors, only to discover that Nellie, the incredibly nice woman who served me coffee every morning in high school, is still working behind the same counter. She’s much older now, but still exudes the same warm smile she always used to. I walked in, and extended my hand, and said something like, “Hi, Nelly, you probably don’t remember me, but my name is Mike, and I used to come in here almost every day...” Nellie peered closely at me, and then she said, “Ahh! Mike, of course, I remember you.” For some reason, I didn’t believe her. But then she blew me away, when she smiled and said, “So how is Pittsburgh?” A woman who served me coffee for one minute a day, for about two years straight, in the late nineties, still remembered who I was and where I went to college! All I could do in return was to blink, and give time for the icicle that is my heart to adjust to some new heat. I think that The Kinks were right when they sang, “People change, but memories of people stay the same,” because even though Nellie and I were never actually close, we left our reunion feeling the buzz that can only come from a stroll down memory lane.
The entire trip was a pleasant stroll down memory lane. The only problem was that I felt like I was strolling with a walker. On the drive home I had to stop more than I used to in order to use the bathroom, because coffee and water seem to affect my bladder more now than they used to. I found myself drifting into periods of daydreams in which I would flow with the traffic, instead of trying to speed to victory in a made up competition with every other car on the road. I even got pulled over on the trip back home, and was so calm about the whole process that the officer was nice to me, and reduced the speeding violation to a minimum fine. And I left this experience respecting him for it, which means that I actually respected authority—and that means that I’m officially over the hill.
At the rate things are going, I should go to Rite Aid tomorrow to buy Metamucil and prune juice. Before it’s too late, and I’m incapable of learning new things, I should also probably learn how to play bridge, because I hear that’s what all the cool folks do at the old folks homes. I wonder if they’ll accept me among their group, or if I’ll come across as a youngster, since I know what the secret word ‘Google’ means. I’m probably just being paranoid; and I guess I shouldn’t worry, I’m still young enough to learn new things, and I’m sure that one of the local colleges teaches a course on text messaging and drinking light beer responsibly. I think I’m just overreacting from my ten-hour solo drive up the coast, in which I had a lot of time to reflect, and hit sensory overload.
But reflection and realization are two of the keys to growing old gracefully, and since I’m in it for the long haul, I better accept the fact that reflecting on my youth is going to make me feel old. But for the sake of trying to grow old gracefully, I’d like to share with you some of my reflections from my trip. I have officially decided that with the wisdom that comes with being an old man, I reserve the right to hate the following things: I hate DVD players in cars; I think that they’re dangerous. I despise Satellite navigation consoles in cars, because they remind me too much of George Orwell novels, and the government probably uses them to track you. I hate credit card machines in stores that I have to swipe my own card into, because I feel stupid doing this while a clerk sits there and watches me do what used to be their own job. I’m not a fan of self-check-out lines in grocery stores, because every time I try to buy more than one item, something goes wrong, and I end up having to wait in a different line to get help from some clerk who could have already successfully checked me out. I’m angry with anyone who refuses to use a public bathroom, and then complains about having to go to the bathroom while they have to wait until they’re back at a house with a toilet they can trust. And I loathe the sports-media’s obsession with trying out new camera angles on TV. What on Earth are they trying to simulate with these new angles, and why do they always test these new angles during particularly tense moments of the games? If it weren’t illegal, the trucker in front of me would probably kill these people, and in my old age, I kind of see his point.