Jerry Gill's Enduring Questions

“Showing” and “Knowing” One’s Age

As I have grown older, year by year, I find that certain chronological “landmarks” sometimes startle me into realizing just how many years I have been around. Watching television is perhaps the best source of such startlement. The names and dates of important events and people who made up “The March of Time,” as the Newsreels of my day put it, perhaps provide the best examples of this sort of thing.

      For example, the other night, Mari and I were watching a documentary about President FDR’s career, and they played a brief clip of him speaking on the radio in the 1930s. Suddenly, I realized I had heard those speeches, indeed, that very voice, when I was a child 80 years ago. My grandfather was deeply involved in Democratic Party politics at the time, so we naturally listened to FDR whenever he was on the radio. Remember, there was no TV. 

         Similarly, film footage today of Hitler and his Nazi Stormtroopers berating and herding Jewish people brings back memories of World War II, which I experienced firsthand as a kid. Also, sporting events from before our time look quite different from how they were when millions of other viewers, including me, had a chance to see them. Back then, they were all “out of reach” without TV news coverage. I used to watch the Newsreels carefully to see my favorite players “in person” before I had a chance to read about their exploits. When I see such “reruns,” I realize how “old” I have become.

Having lived through the Great Depression and World War Two gives one’s view of those realities a more “first-hand” quality, perhaps more vivid, if not more real, than mere “accounts” of them in history books. I had the privilege of marching with political leaders after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and it made all the difference in how I feel and think about those days. This is not just the difference between having “been there” and not, but also the difference in the “distance” one feels long after the events themselves. That difference renders one conscious of the flow of time and how it, along with reality, literally “leaves you behind.” 

There is absolutely nothing “new” or especially “deep” about what I am trying to get at here. Time and life move on, and that’s the simple truth. The difficulty for those of us being “passed by” is that our lives get ‘thinner” and harder to track and hold on to. For a long while, our lives were busy and rich with meaning, and now they are getting “slimer” and slower, and we feel increasingly “left out” and bored. Having family and friends helps a lot, as do hobbies and television, but obviously these only work in the short term. What I want is my “life” back, and that’s not going to happen. So “grow up” and get busy with others and things. Maybe something weird and neat awaits us after we “finish up” here. Or at least something ….