Another Reminder Why I Don't Get Old People

Take Control - Weezer (mp3)
Time to Check My Eyelids for Holes - Stereophonics (mp3)

I'm in our church choir. Sunday mornings, our choir processes.

There's not a thing about processing I find very appealing. I don't like the word. I don't like the idea of walking down the middle of the church with a choir book in my hand trying to sing and pay attention to where I'm walking and have all these people looking at me and keeping time with the director way up at the front of the church.

For someone such as I, an untrained and amateurish soul with a voice made for a large choir (as in, it sounds better when buried underneath dozens of other voices), there's just too damn much going on during a processional. The worst part of all is knowing that my voice can be identified quite clearly as I walk past people. There goes Billy, missing the beat again. He's as off-beat as Steve Martin listening to the blues.

This past Sunday, we processed as usual, and I'm making my way up into the back row of seats where all the men now collect when I hear this ominous thud, almost as if one of the pipes from the pipe organ had collapsed on someone. I look over to my right (I sit on the far right side if you're facing the front of the church, which is to say I'm looking at the left side of the front. Or something), and there's five or six blue robes huddled like they're getting ready to call Circle Right Option A Z Post Delta on Three or something*.

* -- sorry. It's football season.

As it happens, one of the many many many elderly folks in our choir fell on their way up the steps. And when I say "many many many," what I mean is that the median age of our choir is 95. What I mean is that, of the 24 regular members, and of the 35 or so total members, I am at 38 the second-youngest human. The third-youngest is almost 50. There's only five or six others below 60. The rest are, like, so old that they probably still use the word "colored" in ways that have nothing to do with crayons.

The spill in question was nasty. Fella tripped on his robe and ended up scraping a huge chunk off his right forearm as well as bruising up several areas of his face and getting several small cuts. His robe got all bloodied. Five different choir members had to leave the choir to tend to him, which represented a full quarter of the day's take.

It kinda makes me an asshole, but I knew this was going to happen. If Vegas had allowed it, I would have staked my entire life's earnings on one of our older members taking a nasty dive during the processional. It would be like placing a bet on the chance it might possibly rain in the next year. Were I a better person, I would have said something. I would have asked aloud, "Why are we processing with so many old old old people? Isn't this unsafe?" But there's always a back story...

You see, our previous choir director, who left being completely despised by 4/5 of the elderly folks in our church and in our choir, ended that great tradition when he came. They thought he ended it because he was a big ol' self-centered know-it-all closeted frosted-tips-lovin' choir director who had to assert his authority over them. In truth, he ended the tradition because he knew someone was going to get themselves hurt.

The old people, all of 'em, almost to a person, are the very people who went apeshit in demanding that we process. Now here's an even better part. Two of the most curmudgeonly old choir members who demanded the Return of the Processional (the new novel by JRR Tolkein!) ended up quitting the choir two weeks later because -- wait for it! -- that's right, they couldn't process safely.

Do you realize what I'm telling you, people?? Old people can be so damned stubborn that they'd rather be right from the sidelines than to be wrong and stay in the game. In fact, I'm pretty sure they'd take the same bet as I would, that one of 'em was doomed to get hurt. But by God, if that's the cost of maintaining a tradition, then that's the G-D cost, and that's the way it is, and that's that, so bugger off and let me die already in some traditional freakin' way!

Point is, saying something was pointless. So I was left to just ride out the processional storm out and wait for someone to fall and hurt themselves and hope it wasn't serious like a broken hip or worse.

And that's what happened, thank God. A fall. Bruises and superficial wounds. No broken hips. And a vote, coming Wednesday night, that the practice of processing into the choir loft on Sunday mornings be postponed until further notice. A vote I know will pass because I had the votes locked up before we even left the choir loft on Sunday morning.

The Art of Talking or Not

Badfinger--"Perfection" (mp3)
Babyshambles--"You Talk" (mp3)

We were sitting in Mama Leone's in Venice, Florida over Spring Break. They have terrific pizza and other pasta offerings and the place is a big hit with "the Oldies." I'm sorry, that may not sound like an appropriate label, but you have to call them something. It is not normal to be in a place with such a preponderance of the elderly. All of the Seinfeld jokes come to mind about "the eventual left turn" being legal in Florida and the "I survived, let's see if you can, too" method of elderly drivers pulling out in front of you.

Anyway, at the next table three elderly couples chatted back and forth, the gist of the conversation being one couples' upcoming trip to Italy. It sounded like they had spent a lot of money on a villa and were trying to recruit at least one of the other couples to come along.

I've spent a lot of time in Florida, observing these social groups. Often, there is an alpha female, rather than an alpha male, who runs things. I guess by the time we pass 65 or 70 years, the women are even more in charge than ever. We're just happy to get a steady stream of urine.

In this group at the next table, there is a definite alpha female: she has more jewelry, blonder hair (her true age not a factor in hair color), and clothing that she didn't buy at one of the old lady boutiques down on Venice's main street.

So. She is saying, as if this will close the Italy deal, "And, Edward, you will like this. There is a separate exit for the boys, in case you boys want to head out at night."

Everyone looks at Edward. I think he smiles a little, but I can't really tell. There is a silence that follows, and we can hear it at the next table. Our salads are long gone, our pizzas nowhere in sight.

Edward's wife intervenes. "I try," she says, "I try and I try but I just can't get him to talk."

Then I realize that the alpha female knew this and that is why she spoke to Edward in particular, in hopes that he might speak.

Is it possible, that among the many things that fall away as we get older, the need to talk is one of them? I don't know. I'm just a nosey eavesdropper at the next table. But it doesn't seem like Edward had a stroke or anything. It's more like he just lost the need or lost the interest in talking.

Sure, it must make for a hell of a marriage, but what a circumstance. I think of the lines from the Neil Young song, "You know, I keep getting younger/My life's been funny that way/Before I learned how to talk/I forgot what to say." What if a person can simply run out of ideas for conversation?

Each night, or at least each work night, I seem to hit a magic hour when the idea of talking and listening becomes less and less attractive to me. Usually, that happens around 9 or 10 o' clock. Maybe it's something about having a job where people walk into my office all day long and want to talk about whatever's on their minds. Pastoral care, they call it. In an informal way, at least. Those of us who, however correctly, are identified as good listeners must have ears that are more like cisterns than anything else. Maybe we can only fill them so full.

And so, at some point, we don't have have anything to say anymore, and don't really want to listen to much either. Many things, we know, are finite, but we don't really think of talk, of speaking, of needing to get some point or some information across, either in a given day or in a lifetime, as one of those things.

If Wallace Stevens is right that "[t]he world is ugly and the people are sad," then how much of that can we stand to hear about? Maybe no more, I would argue, than most of us have to say about it. Maybe our internal mechanism tells us that we can only take so much, and much of our conflict, especially with our spouses, comes when that other person doesn't realize that we have had as much as we can take that day even though he or she has something about that ugliness or sadness that has to be said, to be emptied into someone else's cistern. But, we have so much more to hear tomorrow, and we have to have some time to get ready for that.

Of course, the alternative, though interesting to ponder, is awful. Trying to imagine the need to say nothing, ever, for weeks and months, like Edward, is almost more than most of us can imagine. "Successful conversation can take you very far."

"Perfection" comes from the Badfinger album, Straight Up, not currently available on Itunes and probably caught up in those Beatle song negotiations. "You Talk" is from Babyshambles' last CD and keeps alive the hope that the Libertines might one day reunite if Pete Doherty doesn't die. By the way, turn up that Badfinger song, converted from a vinyl album, and listen to how good the old technology sounds!