Keep a Robust Rock in Your Pocket

This morning while I was walking at the dog park, a guy called me out of the blue to set me straight on a question I’d asked on Facebook. This was about an organization with which we had both been affiliated, me a while ago, him now. And in his position with the organization, which unfortunately has been falling apart in quite dramatic ways, he’s taken on something of a messianic tenure.

Is it familiar? I alone can fix it.

Within three minutes, we were both yelling.

It started with him lecturing me and then escalated into our talking over each other and then, finally, yelling loud enough that one of my dogs turned around to come back for me, maybe thinking I was being attacked by someone.

Just minutes before, I’d decided to make a short video on my phone in recognition of Ageism Awareness Day. I stopped and started, not getting the right angle, either physically or intellectually. And then the phone rang.

What is it I wanted to say about ageism? It’s bad. Really bad. And people shouldn’t be ageist; the world shouldn’t be ageist. But what I wanted to get at was that we, us, old people, need to shed our own ageism, all the little no’s and can’ts, all the self-deprecating memory jokes, the portrayal of ourselves as collections of symptoms, the strained deference to a world we’ve decided just spins too darn fast for us.

We need to remember our robust selves. We need to hike up to the attic, open that fancy Christmas box from twenty years ago and find our little robust jewel buried in all the tissue paper. And then we need to slip that sweet rock in our jeans pocket and remember where we came from.

It felt good to yell at this dude. Mr. I alone can fix it.

Robust.