Today, I took refuge in this coffee house to drink chai and read Steinbeck's book "Travels with Charley," a travelogue of sorts about his trip across America in 1960. I find it interesting he wrote it when he was in his middle fifties, an age close to my own. I can see a rich, educated man's point of view in this book, especially one who wants to mythologize his vision of himself and America before he is forced by death to leave it. Interesting to me, looking back on his view of 1960 sixty five years later, is the whiff of his "old man grumpiness" in his prose about the era in which he lived. No American-Vietnam War yet; no Internet bots, arguments, or controversies; no global threat of climate change like there is now. Did 1960 deserve his critique, mild or not? Maybe. I never lived it, or had his years before. He was a veteran, so maybe the insidious traumas of war and exposure to intense sufferings like poverty accumulate over time and injure the soul's natural predisposition to happiness. Somehow, though, I think every age has its disappointments, and it is better to not look with too critical an eye on the world in which we live. To repeat the famous tautology, "it is what it is." Life exists on its own terms and change inevitable. The fault lies in ourselves and not the stars after all.
In any case, this book is helping to pierce my personal and somewhat unconscious concept of perpetual youth a little bit. He saw himself as old, a senior, at fifty-six. Contemporary society wants that to still be the upper end of middle age. In my case, I still hope to reach that confidence of a settled middle aged adulthood, to finally realize the unfulfilled dreams of youth and hope. But, achievement and modest material accomplishments always seem so far off, as if I were still somehow in my late twenties. I certainly am not. I haven't had the traditional markers of success: wife, great job, house, kids. Seems impossible to get all that now. Maybe I have to accept I am actually old, a senior, and that the many opportunities of my youth are permanently gone, no matter how mentally and emotionally difficult that may be to accept. The brain is subtle and clever when it comes to self-deception.
I'm not a kid. I'm old to the world that keeps changing. I don't want to be irritated by the manifold changes of culture and time, but as a man in my fifties, like Steinbeck then, it creeps in now and again at the edges of my emotions, ready to pounce in a flash of criticism, both inward and outward. For example, I don't want to have to download an app on my phone to pay a bill, have most of my information harvested and sold at every turn by the 'rewards card' at the gas station or grocery store. And I definitely don't want to pay seventy dollars for one casual dress shirt, etc.
When I was a teenager, I heard a story about my then seventy year old grandfather who didn't want to pay more than twelve dollars for a pair of jeans. I laughed at the absurdity of his indignation, as good jeans back then were at least thirty dollars or so. Now, all these years later, he's in heaven having the last laugh at me when I balk at the eighty dollar pair on the shelf at the local store. I've become him.
For men my age, the default to all these perceived encroachments to dignity and the thousand little changes to how life is lived can be grumpiness. So, like Steinbeck and my grandpa, I feel all those same grumpy impulses.
But, I also really hope to learn by their lived example and try to be detached instead, to acknowledge the emotion and set it aside if it is not useful to the situation. It's the better way. The world will always be bigger than myself and my petty opinions. My transient feelings, no matter how important they might seem to me, often won't actually change anything, and maybe aren't even based in reality. These grumpy impulses of irritation aren't the blaring alarms of injustice going off, but rather manifestations of a misperception of reality that I no longer completely understand or master. I'm slowly, inevitably becoming irrelevant to a world that ultimately leaves us all behind in the grave anyway. Things move on, and youth accepts these changes with the grace of not knowing any different. Insignificant as I am in this living-life process, I would much prefer to bend like the young fresh flower and not break like the tied old oak. As the modern cliche says: "Feelings aren't facts." Difficulties abound for us all, young and old alike, and they will ever continue to do so. The timeless unending universe will never be impressed by my (or any other's) twinges of grumpiness, justified or otherwise.
My goal, as far as I can see it, is to accept the passing of time with the manner of a polite guest who can't repay the incredibly generous favors already given him. May God give me the strength to do that.