How A Story My Grandfather Tells Me Might Serve As A Schema For The Stupid Things You Think About Around Your Birthday
The term “octogenarian” has always been a bit fustian for my tastes. I understand it’s more terse than “someone in their 80's”, but aside from knocking a few ticks off a word-count, I don’t see the point in labeling decades. In fact, it’s more than a simple case of point-missing. It’s downright disapproval. “Septuagenarian” or “centenarian” or any other “-narian” adds a disturbing, almost fatalistic quality to aging. Getting older would purport to be a gradual process; maybe a bit tiered here and there by milestones (although after twenty-one, I suppose the only milestones left are those suffixed by 5’s and 0's), but for the most part, fundamentally incremental. When the more erudite among us start tossing in utilitarian terms like “sexagenarian”, they stratify the aging process. Reaching a certain decade permits entrance to an exclusive “club” of sorts, one so proper and distinct it warrants a one-word title. And unlike other eligibility requirements, the act of aging does not leave these new prospects with any sense of agency. There can be no choice to join or not join the club. When you turn 80, you are an octogenarian. When you reach 110, you are a super-centenarian. There is no option, no autonomy — time and etymological trickery have cordoned the youthfully challenged into neat little ten-year boxes. And we can label these boxes with intuitive terminology, just as we would qualify any club, organization, race, stereotype, gender, culture, high-school clique, etc… with a one word descriptor which all at once identifies and stigmatizes. An octogenarian is a jock without the preterit option to become or not to become a jock (and, most likely, without the ability to toss a football thirty yards).
Just in case people didn’t need further tangible manifestations of mortal terror, there exists a means of breaking life up into decuplets: conveniently paced chunks of years. Seventy-one and seventy-nine are both septuagenarians, regardless of all the discrepancies between the two. Terms such as these ratify all our fears about permanence, and the assured fatality of reaching 60. In other words, giving names to decades only serves to increase our fear of death. It compartmentalizes stages of life. Milestones = checkpoints in a race everyone is literally dying to finish. Entering one decade requires discarding the last. Except people are not rocket-ships. You do not detach your Stage 1 Thrusters once you pass thirty. The numerical emphasis on aging is only borne of this instinctual need for qualification. In the local greeting-card store, birthday cards are sub-categorized by the first year of a new decade: “Congratulations on turning 40!…50!…60!…70…80…90…” (the list suspiciously stops after that). And it bugs me, because there’s this latent anxiety involved with labeling the decades. People rush through in a mad dash to the next round, because this taxonomic system permits only a change in label, not an exemption from labeling. And people hate stagnation enough that they’d rather become an octogenarian, if only it means not being a septuagenarian anymore.
Anyway, my grandfather is 80-something and worked on a shipping vessel sometime between 1944 and 1953. He was too young for World War II, and his father died in naval “combat” (as in, a British sub mistook his masted ship for a U-Boat and torpedoed it). By the time he was my age, my grandfather had seen more of the world than I’ve been able to label on a globe; everywhere from Australia to the Straits of Gibraltar. Home was some hokey mountain-village in Croatia (that Northern Part of the Italian Alps everyone raises a quizzical eye to the mention of when I tell them I’m one-quarter Croatian). His ship returned to a home-port in Naples every once-so-often, and my grandfather was able to hike back up to his verdant backwater and shoot the shit with the last five or six people he knew who hadn’t been killed by Nazi’s, rebels, or disease. Now he speaks in an absolutely inimitable accent and lives in a storied apartment in Queens, complete with 1970’s regalia and an arboreal carpet I can only describe as “gnarled.” My grandfather has told me the follwing story at least four times, each time indicating, with gusto, that he must impart some morally imperative lesson. I do not believe my grandfather is senile. He just cares about the past too much.
I’m going to quote my younger sister on this one, simply because she has a subtle gift for comparisons only the young and unfettered might possess: “My grandfather speaks like a fortune cookie” (Isabella Yurman 2011ish). And this parabolic diction likely stems from a rudimentary, heavily biblical understanding of the English language. I would not call my grandfather “wise”, not insomuch as it precludes him from basic human error or frustratingly irrational habits. I will, however, acknowledge he has a penchant for pith. Example: “There are two ways, the crooked and the straight. If you take the straight, *gestures amicably toward some suffused, divine substance*, but if you take the crooked, *the gesture turns inexplicably disdainful*, foughettabouttit.” At any rate, his stories usually consist of some garrulous exposition, falsely accentuated by a tinkling timbre and painfully broken English. He roars and coughs at unpredictable intervals, sounding like a car muffler struggling to hear itself breathe in a blizzard. He’s not exactly speaking a foreign language. It’s more like a dying dialect, one so briefly familiar but overwhelmingly imprecise.
After a few years on the ship, my grandfather arrived back at port for another customary visit to his old village. Before he reached those far-flung meadows and idyllic stretches of browning sheep, he passed through some Northern Italian hamlet. A family friend lived there, and he popped in for a visit. Here the particulars are lost in sixty years of muddled memories and dead faces; countenances cast argent and blotted, as if by a low haze, shaped scantily by a heady fog draping any recollection. So as to his relation with this friend I cannot speak, but I was able to glean from those convoluted details that she was a she, and she was far older than he, and she lived alone, and the whole time they were together, he only had eyes for some pretty girl wandering past her window.
As my grandfather recounted his adventures, then still biting playfully at his thoughts, to this elderly friend, she offered little reaction to his fervor. When she asked him about his plans for the future, he seemed as vague as I might be today, answering a similar question, as any youthful victim of 21st century spoils might dodge any queries concerning a more ardent form of permanence. In other words, he answered as a young man; full of the unquenchable sort of determination visible only in the ignorant and the naive.
My grandfather stares at me through wrinkles and red eyes. His calloused hands cup the table like tree stumps upon the Earth — long cut down, but impossible to uproot. He chews his gums — habitual and tick-ish. He looks perpetually in need of the cigarettes he quit long ago.
He tells me what that woman said to him some sixty-four years before: “Think about when you’re older.” And then he tells me, his eyes losing glaze, sharpening like mine when I finally give in and put on my ugly glasses, that I should do the same. When he was young and invincible he thought, “Who is this woman? Telling me to think about when I’m older? I’m a young man. I’m twenty years old. Why should I care about this?”
My grandfather sits sipping cold tea, trapped beneath all his wrinkles and his memories, asking me to think about age and time, and how the latter plays this cruel, infinite trick on the former. “Always take the straight”, he says, “and think about when you’re older.”
But I’m a young man. I’m twenty years old.
