May 29, 2013 Article

The Old Coot explains why he’s a grump.

By Merlin Lessler

Old Coots have a chronic memory problem. “Oh sure,” people say, “We know all about it; you can’t remember names; you can’t remember what you went into the living room to get, stuff like that.” That’s all true, and a frustration for sure. But, that’s not the memory problem I’m talking about. The real problem is that we remember too much.

A young guy (in his twenties) will say to an old coot, “Boy the village looks great!” The old coot will respond, “Oh yea? You should have seen it when I was a kid. It was a commercial beehive. We had a lot more commerce: shoe stores, department stores, music stores, restaurants. The sidewalks were packed with shoppers and diners.”

Or, the young guy might say, “I just got a new Chevy; it’s super; it reminds me to change the oil, has built in GPS, 4 speaker stereo; it even lets me know if one of the tires is a little low on air. To which the old coot will respond, “Oh yea! Well, in my day we could fix every thing on a car. Now, a guy can’t fix anything; it’s all controlled by the computer. You’re not in charge of the car; the car is in charge of you.”

You name a topic; we can tell you how much better it was “back then” in the good old days. Especially, when it comes to the cost of things. Mention how much you just paid for gas and you get an old coot eruption. “$3.65 for a gallon of gas! In my day it was twenty-six cents a gallon; pizza was a buck; candy bars were a nickel; movies were a quarter; bla bla bla.” We fail to mention that the minimum wage was eighty cents an hour.

Of course, we heard the same type of gripes from old guys when we were the young guys. Those guys groused about all the changes too. How everything had gone down hill; how stupid the government was. We thought they were sour old crows. “Look around,” we’d say. “Things are great; we’ve got TV, private phone lines, four-lane highways, pizza, cinematic movies, 33 1/3 records, automatic transmissions.” And, they would come back with, “Well, we hardly paid any federal income tax and Social Security was secure. And besides, everything you have you owe to us; we won the wars, the big ones, WWI and WWII.”

It’s the long-term memory that makes old coots into old grumps. We live in two worlds: today’s world and the “back then” one. So, be nice to us; we have a double problem; a long-term memory that is too good, and a short-term memory that is….., oh what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh yea, unreliable.