As I go trundling through life, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my age. I am active. I am still learning lots of new stuff. I don't reminisce much or live in the past. The number of times I have orbited the sun while riding this Bootcamp Planet is not a restriction for me.
Until recently, I thought of my age as a 'middle adult' program that ran in the background and was never seen onscreen. I liked it like that. I had so successfully repressed my actual numerical age that if I was given a form to fill out that wanted that information, I would have to subtract my birth year to figure it out. True. Really.
Mentally, I would choose my age much like a fashion accessory. Some days I would feel 8, or 17, or 40, or 59 depending upon who I was with and what I was doing. The youngest person that I have a friendship with just completed kindergarten; from there, the ages of my friends run right on up to octogenarians. This broad-band approach has a lot of advantages. Believe me. A lot of good stuff is even better when viewed through childhood awe, a lot of bad stuff is easier to dismiss when viewed through an elderly perspective, and many piddly faults are super-easy to forgive and toss to the wind when the immensity of eternity is considered.
But then...
Other people's expectations occasionally come up and slam me. For instance, apparently not knowing one's own age, as I described in Paragraph 2, is a very real sign of dementia in some paradigms. I find it pretty scary that some people think I "need an evaluation" because I had to stop and think how old I was. I spent too much of my childhood living in emotional boxes, trying to please others, to now (as a middle adult) be left with any respect for control freaks who want to shove me into their new boxes.
But then at other times...
Regrettably, sometimes the age gap is much larger than I thought it was and I am completely taken by surprise. It happened this Memorial Day.
Time and geography have made Memorial Day a meaningful holiday for me. Every classmate in my elementary school had either a dad who had fought in WWII or a parent who had worked in the supply factories. Every adult in my life knew someone who "did not make it back." I had teachers who had been widowed by that war. Every spring my Brownie troop would march in the local parade to the cemetery, carrying small American flags.
I do not dwell on those days much, but they framed me. The town nearest where I live now has an annual hometown-style parade for which I have built floats, walked the route passing out candy and prizes, and worn the t-shirts to support my candidate or cause. Vintage Americana. Red, White, and Blue. A memorial that reminds us of our sacrificial heritage, when we knew the honor of paying now for a better future.
Forward to 2017. In a space/time world of international gameplay on handheld devices, chat happens. Asians, of which there are quite a few, had questions about our holiday: Was it about Vietnam? Was it celebrating war?
The international audience was not getting accurate answers. The "Memorial" part— the remembrance of heart-rending personal sacrifice— was being obscured with the regular banter and gibberish. And on top of that, well-meaning Millennials started talking about Veteran's Day, which is a time for honoring the living. (What have they been teaching in schools for the past 20 years???) Well, more than Oops, my response was a total travesty! My abhorrent social incorrectness was showing. How dare I?
In this new time/space world's more liberal social policies, it is now an extreme offense to correct unintentional mistakes if people get touchy about it. I am a complete idiot for not knowing this.
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