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Old People Make Me Sad

Perhaps it's a complex from movies like Requiem for a Dream, where an elderly lady takes diet pills to try to lose weight so her son will love her again, or that terrible Avril Lavigne video, where the old man lays his wife's dress out on a bed, and whispers to her clothes just how much he misses her. But the very scenario of being old makes me very, very sad.

I see elderly people get on the streetcar, and I just want to jump up and give them my seat so that they'll smile, and look happy when they sit down. Mind you, I almost always sit at the back of the car, so unless the entire front of the car was filled with seniors, I probably wouldn't get the chance (and if some jerk kid didn't get up, I'd kick his brain in).

See, I look at these little old ladies, with their perfectly matched outfits, right down to the purse, and the old men who wink at me, and then seem embarrased that they have so much trouble sitting down, and I think they look lonely. And maybe they aren't, but there are some who are. There are some who go home and find no one there, some who wait by the phone for someone to call when no one will, and some who feel tired, achey, and just old. But I'm sure they remember when things were entirely different, and they know that unlike when they were young, not everything waits ahead. That just makes it all the sadder.

I used to work door to door, switching people's phone service. I went to an old man's door, and he invited me in. He had a fairly large house, and he lived there alone. He wanted to switch his phone service so that it would cost less to call his kids, who lived pretty far from him. He also wanted me to set up his answering machine, because sometimes he didn't hear the phone ring, and he wanted his kids to be able to leaves messages so he could call them back, and they wouldn't stop calling. He told me all about his grandkids, and got out pictures to show me. He tried to give me some coffee cake he had made, which was his wife's receipe. He had already signed the papers to switch over his phone, but every time I stood up to leave, he would think of something else to tell me, something else to offer me. Finally I left, and he waved at me through the window.

I went around the corner of the street, sat on the curb, and cried. Not only was that man so terribly lonely that he would talk to a random stranger off of the street, but I had in fact made a commission off of his lonliness. I didn't do anything wrong; he had ended up saving like $2 a month or something, but I felt terrible.

I quit the next day.

So now, I'm watching my family grow old. My dad falls asleep on the couch, and when you wake him up, there is a minute in his eyes where he doesn't know where he is. My mother repeats herself, and repeats herself, to the point where I've stopped telling her I've heard it before. My grandfather, who used to debate politics with me over dinner,  and hit on anything in a skirt, is now showing early signs of senility; drooling without noticing he's doing it; falling down, hitting his head, and not being able to get up to call someone, so that we find him a day later next to dead (he's now fine- on the by and by).

And so I'm watching them get old, and they wish I wasn't watching them that way, and I will wish the young will stop watching me, and we're all getting old. So old.