#51 Day Light Savings
Yet another friend of mine made fun of me last night for going to sleep insanely early. Sure, it was my first night since I flew back into Portland where I didn’t have to get up early for work the next day. And sure, it was a genuine Saturday night for most of my friends and me, since they too had the next day off from work or school, so it was a good opportunity for all of us to party into the wee hours of the night. But what can I say? I love the early mornings, and I hate to sleep through them, so I go to bed early, in order to rise early. Plus, I knew that I was going to lose an hour of my life to the impending day light savings time change, so I wanted to go to bed with an extra hour of wiggle room. But it was a little embarrassing when I was in Tampa last weekend, visiting my nearly ninety-two year old grandfather, and even though my body was on West Coast time, three hours earlier, I woke up earlier than my grandfather every morning of my visit.
Suffice it to say that a visit with a man who has been cognizant and keen for nearly ninety-two spins on planet earth is a pretty amazing experience. If you know anyone who is really, really old, and extremely lucid with a memory like an elephant, then I suggest you grab some paper and a pen, and go visit them, even if only for an afternoon – because there’s a lot to learn, and I’m not just talking about how to milk the government for free meds.
My grandfather, Papa, was born in August of 1915. 1915…hmmm…let’s see…that means that he was born just around the same time that Al Gore was inventing the wheel, in preparation for his next two inventions: global warming and the Internet. But really, my Papa, he’s seen a lot of things change in his lifetime. He’s witnessed a large part of the desegregation process in America, and if he lives long enough to see Barack Obama take the oval office, then perhaps he’ll have seen the piece de resistance of said process. He’s outlived both his parents, all of his siblings, and many of his sibling’s children. He talks about life and death a lot, and death is clearly on his focused mind as he prepares to enter his mid-nineties. But in speaking of life, death, and what lies in between the two, he doesn’t seem to have any regrets. In my interviews, he revealed to me that he has no regrets because he never had a life plan, he just lived and did what felt right in the moment – something I suck at. He did, however, point out the fact that no one he knows who has been healthy in their eighties continued to smoke cigarettes past the age of forty – something to consider, but I’d still prefer to quit well before that age!
My visit with Papa was all too short, I literally spent about thirty-six hours with the man before I had to jet back to Portland, in order to live my life, and work at my job, and continue to fulfill my role in the social contract that my parents signed me up for whenever they got all romantic and created their favorite zygote (me!). But something about my visit with my Papa has stuck to me, and changed my attitude. Don’t look now, friends, but I’m a little more relaxed, and a little less worried about my future and my role in this world. (I said don’t look now! Give me some time; I’m not fully there yet!)
Like today, for example, when I woke up at seven a.m., I discovered that my cell phone company had not yet adjusted my clock to the appropriate non-daylight-savings time, but instead of getting all cranky and uptight, and then blaming them for their poor service, I laughed at the fact that even in this supposedly modern and responsible day and age of ultimate corporate business etiquette and punctuality, a ‘Mega-Corp’ like Sprint-Nextel could drop the ball so easily. So they didn’t adjust their clocks until noon, I forgive them. (But I am still pissed that I have to have a camera on my phone.)
Right now, I’m at a coffee shop, where some guy just started playing slow, emotional acoustic guitar driven songs, and when he finished the last one, even though I thought it was a sappy, overly emotional, and uninventive piece, I put both my hands together and joined in with the rest of the people here for the ‘obligatory’ coffee shop clap for the random artist trying to attract my attention towards his mostly empty tip jar. “Look, pal, I might be a newer, more relaxed version of myself, and I may be willing to type this column with your semi-awful heartfelt tunes as a backdrop, but if I’m tipping anyone in this place, it’s going to be the hard working Barista behind the counter – sorry!”
But back to my Papa, and what he’s taught me; I think the bottom line for me is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. My Papa’s seen changes in travel, from boats, bicycles and even horses to airplanes and cars, but despite our ability to safely travel a longer distance in a shorter time, the human condition remains quite the same. Assholes are still assholes, politicians still lie and deceive the masses, and taxes always seem to be higher than they should be. Scandals and issues may change in name, from Harding to Nixon to Bush, and from Segregation to Sexism to Gay Marriage, but the same thing is going on, when one looks into the heart of the matter, and that’s that we live in a society that is constantly playing a game of tug of war between those who wish to keep things the same, and those who desire tremendous change.
I’m twenty-five going on twenty-six, and my Papa is ninety-one going on ninety-two, but I realized just how much more we have in common than our DNA. We hate liars, fall in and out of love with great ease, pretend we don’t hear things when we don’t want to address an uncomfortable issue, and we both have an affinity for early morning conversations over coffee. He’s also a type two diabetic, and yet I caught him sneaking in candy on my visit the same way that I used to sneak in cigarettes outside high school football games, proving that addiction runs in my family as well. And just like my own father, who he is not related to, he’s still adjusting to the more recent trends of politically correct language use, and can thereby come across as both stubborn and judgmental at times, but when it comes down to it, he’s a hippie at heart, a man who wants to give love out to the world, because it feels good, and it feels right.
I’m not sure what my role is in this giant game of life, but it was refreshing to talk about life with someone who thinks that they are at the end of theirs, and damn happy with how it has turned out. My Papa was never rich and he was never famous, but whenever he finally does take off for the final, big sleep, he’ll leave behind a legacy of life-long friendships and correspondences with hundreds of men and women across the world, something that I, at twenty-five, am trying to do as well. And one final thing to think about, if you’re planning on living into your nineties is the fact that there’s a lot of time to do a lot of things, so don’t rush your own life, or you’ll end up getting tense and distraught over lost time. In closing, take some time today, to adjust your clock forward.
My Papa and me.
