A Genealogy of Boring Old Men

Do you remember when Ronald Reagan said, "I wasn't born on the other side of the tracks, but I was close enough to hear the whistle?" In my mid 50s now, I feel the same way about geezerhood. The scariest thing should be impoverishment, increasing solitude, the loss of mental faculties, disease, pain, and finally death. But it isn't.

The scariest thing is slowly turning into one of those old men who talks endlessly about themselves, usually about some dumb job they had way back when.

Why don't they understand how boring that is? Maybe they do, but they think the world owes it to them to humor them.

This seems like an odd attitude for a guy who loves history. Aren't garrulous old men just practicing what could be romanticized as "the oral tradition," from which written history developed? But the old boy wants to talk about how in '66, he got promoted to the 5th floor -- wait a minute now, I'm trying to remember -- maybe it was the 4th floor. Well anyway, the metal file cabinets were beige on that floor instead of battleship grey like at his old job and...

Why don't I have the nerve to just get up and leave? Or why don't I just finish sentence #2 despite his interruption, instead of letting him bully me into listening to another 15 minute monologue.

Recently the influence of a couple other people got me looking into genealogies on the internet. It was a pleasant surprise to get anywhere at all without hitting the roadblock of registrations or fees for reports. By then, I balked; the first flush of excitement was over. You can only get so excited about names, dates, and places. It is far more interesting to learn how people lived and thought in olden times.

In a faraway land, in a century twice removed, a grandfather (farfar in Swedish) of mine was born. Unlike most people he actually typed out a brief autobiography in his emeritus years to his grandchildren in the landlocked interior of North America:

I was born on an island in the Baltic Sea, Aland Island. This island was settled by the Vikings. As a boy I used to play in a Viking graveyard, although I did not know it at the time. When the Vikings returned home from war they brought the ashes of their dead to be placed in mounds lined with bricks.

After my birth, my father left me on the steps of the church so my grandmother raised me, having to be both a father and mother to me. She had very little income, only a small pension granted her, her husband having been a sea captain.

When I was thirteen years old, I told her that I would like to earn some money during the summer to help keep us through the long severe Arctic winter. She said to me, "That is an awful life to go to sea." I did go to sea as a cabin boy on a two-masted ship that hauled wood from Finland to Stockholm, Sweden.

During that year, 1904, Norway seceded from Sweden. I heard some of the workers say that there would be war...

Alas, after this fine beginning, my grandfather's autobiography devolved into uninteresting details. The Old Testament of the Bible had the same problem. Do old men screw up at what they should be good at because they have lost the brain cells necessary to do a good job, or have they never really considered that it takes effort and skill to tell a story. Maybe they see telling a story as a time-killing exercise in self-indulgence, to be practiced at the expense of an innocent victim.