Following Friday’s musings about aging, I was reminded of how fragile life can be by talking to an elderly gentleman on Sunday.  He was the great-grandfather of my daughter’s friend who was having her birthday party and couldn’t have been a nicer guy.  I believe he was either in his late 80s or early 90s but in darn good shape for that advanced of an age.

He was born on a Minnesota farm but had lived in Georgia the past 40 years.  The story that stuck out from the ones we talked about was quite morbid.  We were talking about storms and he mentioned how, as a five year old, he saw his stepdad’s remains after a lightning strike.  They had a dairy farm and the main part of the cow pasture didn’t have any trees on it save a dead maple.  A surprise lightning storm struck the tree and his stepdad was near it.  He and his mom ran out to see if he was ok and instead of a happy ending, here was his stepdad completely charred on one side of his body and wasn’t breathing.  The family dog was protecting the lifeless body and pacing back and forth.  Obviously that memory of a dead body stuck with him for a lifetime and it must have been even more pained for him since it was a family member.

As kids, old people seem more of an annoyance and an impediment but as you grow older you realize they’re got a lifetime of stories and advice to give.  They’ve experienced success, failure, mistakes, happiness, and sorrow.  While I moan about how athletes my age are now retiring or old veterans, older people are experience more life-changing events such as seeing all their friends die.  I can only hope to see my great grandchildren like the gentleman I spoke with.

The only sad part of the day was seeing him introduce himself to someone else and when he tried to recall the name of his grandson, he completely drew a blank.  He was trying so hard to recall the name and it pained me to see him try to remember what he wanted to say.  In his defense, my short term memory is shot to hell too.  I get annoyed with myself when I’ll walk to another room in the house for a purpose and then when I get there I completely forget what the hell I went in there for.  A lot of times, I never do remember why I went there so senility isn’t the exclusive domain of the senior citizen population.

I’ve always said that my plan is to live long enough to be a drain on society.  If I haven’t lived long enough to take more out of the government than what I put in, I will not have succeeded.  While I don’t plan on ever seeing a penny of my Social Security (due to it being bankrupt or me moving to Canada), I do plan on extracting an eye for an eye in terms of what I’ve put into the system.