Tag: generation gap

No One Wants Our China, Recipes, or Habits

I ran across these lines from Psalm 19 this morning and got thinking about just how “one day tells a story to the next”:

2 One day tells a story to the next.
One night shares knowledge with the next
3 without talking,
without words,
without their voices being heard.

What knowledge is our day “sharing with the next”?  What traditions have we passed down?  What has been accepted?  The next generation clearly don’t want our good china or best recipes, while they might be happy to inherit our jewelry and silverware if the items can be readily converted to cash. The NYTimes recently dealt with this issue in relation to the family china: “Younger people are just not interested” says the article. “The dishes are frequently one of the items left over at estate sales. Storage units and landfills are brimming with it.”  No one is to blame; it is just that the world has changed so much.  Between us and our grandparents, a big break.  Between us and our grandchildren, a chasm.  They don’t have our habits, our concerns, our way of doing things, our sense of history.  So says the old lady.

Our generation greatly widened this divergence from tradition, so we can’t exempt ourselves from blame.  We bridled (no pun intended) at registering for wedding china and silver; we were the first generation of women to regularly wear slacks and then – blue jeans.  My grandparents, with their Depression/WWII era thrift and discipline, were completely flummoxed by their grandchildren approaching adulthood in the late 1960s.  For good reason. But we at least had lives that looked a little like theirs.   We ate meals together, celebrated holidays in traditional ways, and wore pajamas and robes.

But the change is almost absolute at this point – this generation has kitchens, yes, and many of them are very pretty kitchens because they are seldom used.  This generation celebrates the more consumer-related holidays in grand gift-giving fashion, but skip church services and big sit-down family dinners. Either they never wear pajamas or maybe I just can’t differentiate between their daywear and their nightwear.  They are much kinder to their children than we were, but their children are not kinder to them.  Would I have gotten out of cooking or going to church on Christmas Eve if I thought I could?  Maybe.  But I was always glad that I had not. 

Of course, there are many more differences from our generation.  No planning menus a week in advance, no Christmas Clubs, no new hats for Easter.   All gone by the board, along with top sheets on the bed.  Again, I don’t know if the new generation is right or wrong, but they don’t seem any happier.  And there is surely no room in their lives for the family china or our string of pearls or the workaday cookbooks stuffed with recipes clipped from newspapers that were actually printed on paper.

One note here: I have almost nothing in common with the Conservative Right in this country (more on that another time), but I can understand (although not sympathize with) their extreme last-gasp effort to roll back the tide.  I might have a little more empathy if they were concentrating on the worst of it – improving slipping education levels, decreasing recidivism, working to curb and cure drug abuse, and limiting the power of technology in our lives.  But they would rather spend their efforts sweeping away those things in which life really is better – civil rights, women’s rights, vast improvements in public health, tolerance of all kinds.  And all this in the name of returning to the glory of the past.  Enough on that for now.

I realize that “things” like dishes are not important in any ultimate sense, but they are part of our lives.  As Borges notes about his possessions in his wonderful poem, “Things”: “They’ll long outlast our oblivion; And never know that we are gone.” 

The china and the pajamas and the recipes are only symbols; but I do care about the loss of communal family things – like leisurely dinners together or the games and sing-a-longs of car trips before everyone had their own source of entertainment under their thumbs.  I miss sitting in a pew in church candlelight and just being quiet together.  But when you change some things, others follow.  We can write a will, but we cannot control our real legacy.  Things like china are only reminders, placeholders.  I will hold onto my china (for now) and my values, but I cannot force them on anyone else.  And as for the things, they’ll “never know that we are gone.”

If you want to read a story about coming to terms with the loss of valued items in our lives, you might try “The Mustard Seed.”  For loss of rituals, you might try “Baptismal Rights.”  Regarding the rituals and habits of old folks, you might try “Routine is the Housekeeper of Inspiration.” And just know that the next time we move – whether to assisted living or the nursing home or the cemetery – the china is not going with us.

 

Covid-19 and the Generational Wars

There has always been a generational divide. In our hippie days, we called it a generation gap, but it was more than that. We didn’t trust anyone over thirty. As our baby boomer generation came into adulthood, moved into jobs, then into better jobs, and finally into collecting pensions, social security, and artificial hips, our children and our children’s children started to worry about who was going to pay for all this. These economic fears were on top of the more individual problems of who was going to go stay with Mom when she had her cataract surgery and how to get Dad’s driver’s license away from him.

In some ways, this is nothing new. When Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, he included the incident of the Struldbruggs, a select group of people who would never die. Their culture did not see them as a source of wisdom, but rather as an economic problem. Their society finally decided to declare them “dead” at the age of eighty, allowing heirs to inherit, taking away their right to vote, and leaving them alone to age while the world went on without them. This just as longevity was starting to increase in the Early Modern world. The younger generations first saw the “baby boomers” hold on to the limited upper-level managerial and professional positions. Then they realized that the retirement of the older generation (us) will be funded by the younger (through the Social Security system, Medicare, and other ways). The economic gerontophobia (yes, there is a word for it!) that Swift outlines is alive and well.

Then, as now, the elderly represent at least three threats. There is the threat that the old will not relinquish control and that their inability to keep pace with change and to release capital will impede progress. Then there is the seemingly contradictory threat that they will have to be supported (both economically and emotionally) in their old age. And finally the very presence of the aged is a memento mori, a threatening reminder of decay and mortality in a culture which does not want to think about these things. This unease is fueled by endemic expectations of scientifically produced and ever-increasing longevity, and juxtaposed with the hopes of the youth that technology will mean that they might, themselves, live long but never get old.

And now we have Covid-19, which is more of a threat to the old, but less of an inconvenience (we mostly don’t have jobs anyway and everyone knows we don’t go out much), and less of a threat to the young and more of an inconvenience (who mostly do have jobs, and may have young children in the house, or could still be looking for partners). I know the young can get Covid-19 and suffer greatly from it, but in Italy 95% of the deaths have been in those over 60 and 84% in those over 70. In the United States, 78% of the deaths have been in those over 65 and 92% in those over 55. Those are alarming statistics for the old, but perhaps empowering for the young.

When these younger folks were our children (or grandchildren), we gave them curfews and told them they couldn’t go to Florida on spring break. Quarantine rules must feel like déjà vu to some of them. How does this all play out? And back to our youthful distrust of anyone over 30. Are we reaping what we have sown?

I wrote an earlier post about whether the old could teach the young anything “(Teach Your Children Well?”), or whether everything had to be learned anew with every generation. Still a good question. In old England, even before Swift’s time, there was an instructional story of a man who made the decrepit old grandfather eat from a trough. One of the young children in the family starts building something, and the father asks what it is. “It’s a box for you to eat out of for when you are old like grandfather,” says the observant child. Thereafter, the old grandfather is treated better. But I am not sure that young people really believe that they are going to get old. Maybe, like our own death, it is too hard to believe. Or maybe we have all gotten too used to thinking in the short term.

Over a decade ago I wrote a novel, The Last Quartet (nod to Beethoven), about a situation that is the exact opposite of what we are facing. In a horrible epidemic, it is the old who survive and have to carry on with the world. I have posted the “Prelude” to this novel here. It is a thought experiment which might be of interest at the moment.

To start thinking about how our view of the aged has changed in the modern world, you might look at the abstract of a dissertation I wrote about the changes that started about the time that Swift invented the poor Struldbruggs.