Respect
by Jim Pentecost 2014
I fucking hate the word elder. But I have to admit is does comes in handy on some occasions.
“Respect your elders” I hear myself saying to the acne faced, wise assed punk teenager in the drama class I teach in a mostly Latino neighborhood, downtown Los Angeles.
“Respect your elders” I hear myself thinking when some young thirty-something vice principal gets all snippy and arrogant with me.
But that doesn’t mean I like being an elder.
It means that I am closer to the end than to the beginning. These days the end could come at any time (not that the end couldn’t have come at any time before but it doesn’t occur to us when we are younger). In the last two months, friends younger than my 62 years of age, have suddenly died. One, seemingly in good health, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and died in four weeks from the time of the diagnosis—58 years of age.
Like many of the teenagers I am around, I often thought my life would be a run on sentence and prefer not to think at some point there was going to be a period. For fuck’s sake, I’d want to go out with a big exclamation point.
But recently I have been looking at life through the prism of an hour glass but not knowing how much sand is still left.
I am impatient with people who don’t have the sense to inquire about my life experiences. Was I this way when I was in my twenties and thirties? Or was I born an “old soul”? I was endlessly fascinated by the experiences and stories of my elders.
But in this day and age of video games, I pods, cell phones, text messages, DVDs, internet porn, does anyone have time to hear a story?
Every once in a while, with my teenagers in school, it clicks that I have been around the block once or twice. When we study frozen stage pictures, one of the photographic examples I show is the iconic photo where Lee Harvey Oswald is shot as he is being transferred from the Dallas County Jail. First they are amazed to learn that I was alive then, and remember so many details of that day JFK was assassinated: Sister Rose Eileen’s eighth grade class, the weather, etc. Some of them do the math and realize that I am older than I look (thanks to staying out of the sun and Grecian Formula).
Sometimes I tell my class, “When I was in college, gas was only $.29 a gallon” and that same acne punk assed kid says, “Really Mister, $.29? Shiiiit Mister.”
Although I may be in the Chekhovian time of my life, the poem by Robert Lowell still resonates loudly:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
©2014 Jim Pentecost.