When I was young I couldn’t wait to get older and do all the things that adults do. Then I got older and reality set in. I had to become responsible (not that I wasn’t responsible before); I had to make decisions that affected the direction of my life. In that regards I chose teaching as that direction. I’ve stated this before, my mother wanted me to become an engineer, my oldest sister was a social worker and my other older sister was a teacher. I sort of gathered all of that together, graduated from college with a double major in Education and Psychology and continued to have a fascination with math, logic and technology. I became a collection of most of my family’s aspirations. My father was a shipping clerk who at one time even had his own business, Walter De Paris, importing little knickknacks from France. His desire was to have a great professional sports athlete as a son. Though I liked sports and played them, the closest thing that I did to follow that dream was playing an ice hockey game at Madison Square Garden while in college and an indoor soccer game at Nassau Coliseum as an adult. I still watch sports.
I think more and more about the aging process. I saw my parents get old. My father died at the age of 77 after a number of strokes and my mother at 84 of heart failure. I didn’t see my father much before he died. I tried to interview him in his nursing home and found out information that he could barely recall about his youth. He was calm and quiet in that place, much different from the man I knew growing up where he could be very opinionated and had a temper. Here he was fighting to remember, but sort of accepting of where he was. My mother on the other hand was very frustrated with growing old, knowing that she needed help to do things that she had done by herself in the past. She was always caring and loving and that never changed to the day she died. Note this an over-simplification of both of my parents. There is more I could write about them, their relationship, and my thoughts/feelings for them, but for now this will suffice.
I’ve seen other people become very angry and somewhat delusional in their old age and wondered if that was a manifestation of what they were like as the grew older. Did their self-control over their behaviors just become too hard to control, so we ended up seeing what they might have been like all along. Again this is an over-simplification. I would guess that most people as they age are not like that.
It’s these things I think about as I get older. What will I turn into when I get old? I rarely get angry, so I would hope that I would be more like my mother in that respect and not become something that I never was and remain calm, caring and nice to be with. On the other hand if you ever looked at what I dream at night you would notice that I’m filled with fantasy. My wife and son can’t believe all the things I relate to them from dreams. Their dreams seem very simple, most of which they can’t remember. Mine are epic stories with incredible detail, most of which I forget after sharing them when I wake up. If that is the direction that I’m going, then I’m going to be quite delusional when I age enough to lose control. If what I’ve noticed in some elderly people happens to me I’ll probably believe those things are really happening. I just hope that they are good stories and don’t cause too many problems for those that care for me.
