Old People: Part II

Let me repeat--it is not as much fun to hang around old people as it once was. I have, like many of you, perhaps, enjoyed the company of my elders most of my life. They were, if they had allowed themselves to live at all, the people with "the wisdom." They passed it down, as is said, and them best of them did it by telling stories. Stories, I learned, do not travel in the other direction. I learned this early on in my twenties when I was hanging with a bunch of older men who were swapping tales over beers on a late Friday afternoon. The stories were endless, and they were, of course, about traveling and drinking and art, and they were about women. They were wry romantics, this crew, with a sardonic edge, most of the irony being discretely self-directed. In short, they were good guys, the types of fellows I wanted to become, able to say something crass without becoming so themselves, big, tender hearted men covered in a keratinized skin. I was enamored by them, but not enough, I recall, to realize my place. And so when a natural pause came (and this is usually a climactic moment when everyone pauses to enjoy and reflect), I made the epic mistake of beginning a story of my own. It was a good story when told to a twenty-something crowd, but one sentence in, I heard my own voice which sounded like tin (if tin were a sound and not a metal, of course), and the force of my own words began to fade as the words themselves came out faster and faster, me trying desperately now to get out of this tale whose denouement receded before me faster than I could catch up to it. The nasally sound and the truncated words seemed infinite, but somehow, finally and without steam, I finished. Everyone by then was looking at the table or over their shoulders as if just having heard his name called. There were a couple of grunts acknowledging that the embarrassment was over, then the long pause before the first of the group said he had to get going which was followed by the inevitable breaking up of the crowd.

I was a smart kid. I never made that mistake again. I became a very good listener.

It has served me well. My contribution to conversations became simple prodding questions. I've listened to the most wonderful things, tales that were the summary of the sort of life and experience that mapped out my own desires. It has been the story of the "good life."

And that is the part of getting old that is the worst, I think, the loss of heroes from another time, people who could genuinely say, "You should have been there. You should have seen her. It was all magnificent and marvelous, and you knew it would never come again."

And so, after leaving the party on Saturday night, as I said, I came home to watch "The Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald's most wonderfully told tale of a time and a place that was madness itself. But the movie--it was a shambles, it was a lie. It was a young boy telling an old man's tale, trying to jazz it up where it need not be jazzed with contemporary music and contemporary sensibilities and factual errors that were historically inaccurate. It was a story told "up," as it were, to me who knows the lines of the novel almost by heart. Maybe some teenagers liked the thing, of course, and maybe that is the way of stories twice told.

But it left me flat. And Fitzgerald won't be telling any more of those most magnificent of tales.