Stuff That Old People Teach Us March 1, 2008

As young people we should never be ignorant to the lessons that we can learn from our elders. One of the lessons I was taught to live by as I grew up was to lead the kind of life that would give our grandparents confidence in our generation. While I know I’ve failed in more ways then I’ve succeeded, I hope that I’ve been giving the proper respect where it’s owed.

Over the summer I went to a 5th of July celebration in Carthage, NY with some friends from the my workplace. After a nighttime fireworks show, we went for a walk down one of the scenic streets. A few minutes later we approached a park bench where a well-dressed older gentleman was sitting. He asked if we enjoyed the firework show. We told him that we had and then proceeded to ask him why Carthage celebrates Independence Day on July 5th. Apparently it is to make sure that everybody who might be away is back in town to celebrate. It’s also nice to attract some people from the surrounding area, which we were a testament to since none of us are actually from Carthage. The man asked us to give him a bag of circles to which we responded that doing so is impossible (a circle is an idea, not an object). We asked him what he did for a living and he made us guess. Eventually we found out that he had studied at Villanova University and from that, correctly established that he was the priest at the local Catholic Church. What followed was a philosophical discussion about faith, love, and politics from the perspectives of a half dozen college students working at a Mennonite summer camp and a wise religious scholar whose life had been devoted to the service of God and his parish.

Last month my maternal grandfather passed away at the ripe age of 90. We knew it was coming for a while so we weren’t shocked. Since then my family has been going over his personal effects and as a result, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for what Tim Brokaw called “the greatest generation”. My grandfather grew up in Nova Scotia and attended Dalhousie University before receiving the Rhode Scholarship to study at Oxford. However, the year was 1939 and the war in Europe had just begun. Like many young men at the time, he put his education on hold to enlist in the RCAF. He was soon transferred to the Royal Air Force, flying on board a piston-engine PBY Catalina as a navigator in the African Theater. For those few terrifying years, Great Britain “the island fortress” stood alone as the last bastion against Nazi aggression. The efforts of him and thousands of other British and Commonwealth airmen meant that the fascists could never sleep easy or achieve their goal of total European conquest. Sir Winston Churchill stated in 1940 in reference to the RAF that, “never has so much been owed by so many to so few”.

We recently discovered some of his personal effects from both the war and his civilian life. For my birthday, my parents gave me a folder they had dug up which contained every article that my grandfather had cut out and filed from the New Yorker on President Lyndon Johnson from their Annals of Politics series. This is the Holy Grail for an American political history junkie. They also found numerous photos of my grandfather and the other men from his air crew.

I was usually shy to talk to my grandfather about his life. He clearly preferred to know more about what I was doing. I wish that I didn’t have regrets now, but if I said that I was satisfied with everything I allowed him to teach me, I would be lying. Still, the fact that he remained an enigma to me even up to his passing suggests something wonderful about his character. From the pieces of his life that I’ve recovered and am only now putting together, I have come to the conclusion that he was a man of humility, kindness, and frugality despite leading a very successful life in the business sector and his own home. My mother often recalls a story from her childhood when she and her parents were in the American South. At one point, they walked into a restaurant in order to enjoy a dinner together. Upon seeing a sign with the words “WHITE ONLY”, my grandfather politely stood up and walked out with his wife and daughter in tow. Such an act of protest says something about a man’s heart and should serve as an example to all people who desire to stand up against injustice.

On a more humorous note, I recently saw an episode of Mad TV with a character by the name of Mrs. Leona Campbell, played by the brilliant Stephnie [sic] Weir. Mrs. Campbell, clearly a woman outside her natural environment, points out the absurdity of young people through her unintentionally ironic questions and suggestions.

Mrs. Campbell asks the types of questions that we ought to ask ourselves. Do I really need an ipod? Do I really want to have another drink? Do I really need to check facebook every fifteen minutes or text message somebody that I will be talking to after class anyways? (The answers are all “no”). Let’s try to pick up where our grandparents left off. That way we’ll give our descendants something good and wholesome to write about.

-optionaltoaster