by Silas House
New York Times, May 8, 2015
BEREA, Ky. — I was always with older folks when I was very young. They
called me “Little Man” and told me I was “an old soul.” I worked in the garden
with my grandparents, learned how to count money with Old Man Hoskins at the
local store, and eavesdropped on the tales of my ancient neighbors. But it was
the stories of my fierce aunt, Sis, that were my favorite.
Unfortunately, it seems there are fewer opportunities for different
generations to interact now. The 2010 United States census shows that
Appalachia, where I live, has some of the lowest levels of age segregation in
the nation. Yet even here I notice a shift away from the intergenerational
activity I enjoyed as a child in the 1980s.
What do we lose as we drift further away from our elders?
I spent a great deal of my time with Aunt Sis, who seems to have always
been old. She knew how to plant and how to build a fire. She had once been
known as the wildest and most beautiful woman in Leslie County, Ky. She was
blunt and hard to please. Sis loved to wear red dresses and red lipstick. Her
coal-black hair was always styled, even after long hours in the yarn factory
that left her hands bloody with thin cuts. I grew up right next door to her,
and everyone said I was “her pick.” She didn’t bother to deny it. “Little Man
is my baby,” she always said, even when I was into my 40s.
Sis challenged my notions of what it meant to be elderly. Sis loved the
most current music. She cussed. She took me to concerts and sneaked me into
R-rated movies. Sometimes she and I danced in her living room to the latest Bob
Seger record. “He’s my favorite!” she’d yell while she snapped her fingers,
every part of her moving. “Turn it up, Little Man!”
More than anything else, my aunt told me stories. She knew all the key
elements of storytelling: love, mystery, trouble. In her tales there was
comedy, tragedy, a man who got his comeuppance, a defiant woman who would not
be defeated, a community that ostracized the heroine. She recalled rationing
and claimed to remember listening to F.D.R., my childhood hero, on the radio.
She brought my long-lost great-grandparents to life.
This is the main thing we lose when we don’t talk to our elders: the
histories. How many teenagers, for example, know the intimate details of the
Kardashians’ lives but don’t know the love stories of their own parents? The
joys and sorrows of the older generations serve as examples for us to learn
from, to emulate or, perhaps even more useful, to avoid. As age segregation
becomes more ingrained in our culture, what cycles will be repeated, what
misconceptions will flourish?
Sis was not without fault, of course. She could be racist and xenophobic in
a casual way that many of her generation shared. I had learned that slurs like
this were not appropriate, and taught her as much. Intergenerational education.
Many of us move away from our hometowns and extended family. As I got
older, I moved, too. We also take less part in the activities that once brought
different generations together: things like church, community-focused
entertainment and communal work. In my hometown, entire families used to attend
an annual sorghum cook-off. We pulled foam off the bubbling syrup, sat around
an outdoor fire and exchanged stories. First the teenagers stopped coming, then
the middle-aged folks. For a while the older generation soldiered on, but that
particular tradition stopped a few years ago now.
The generational divide is nothing new, of course, and it may only continue
to grow. According to the most recent census, the elderly population will more than double between now and 2050. Before then we’ll have to decide if it’s better to
ignore a huge chunk of our population, or if we will embrace everything we can
give to one another.
Members of the older generation can help; they are certainly not innocent
in this. They, too, congregate with those their own age. My generation should
be bridging the gap between the young and the elderly.
My daughters, both teenagers, spent a lot of time with Sis in her very old
age. She may have been on oxygen and in a wheelchair, but the stories she
shared taught them how to be as strong, defiant and determined as she had
always been. Sis taught them that people of all ages have value, and revealed to
them that multigenerational mixing can lead to true laughter, knowledge and
mutual respect.
Sis’s favorite singer, Bob Seger, turned 70 this week and recently released
another album. Shortly before her death in February, I played a few of his new
songs for Sis. She managed to swing her foot along to the beat. Struggling for
breath, she smiled at the music and our joint memories. Now she is gone, and a
universe of stories has gone with her. Fortunately, I had been taught to
listen, to be present, and so those stories go on in me and in my daughters,
handed down from one generation to another.
Silas House is the author, most
recently, of the novel Same Sun Here, with Neela Vaswani.
