WHY GRANNY TELEPHONES AND JUNIOR TWEETS
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one
That went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
George Orwell
“Why are the elderly so set in their ways?” “Why won’t they stop driving?” “Why do they tell the same story over and over again?”
How many times have you heard criticism like that? How many times have you made those very comments yourself?
I am almost eighty years old and I do many of those very things young people hate. I will take five minutes to answer a simple question like “How are you?” I will drive three miles an hour on a motorway so I can read the signs. I will call you darling when I have just met you. I know why I do those things, but you do not. You are not 79 years old.
It occurred to me that if I told you the reason I respond to you the way I do, you will no longer snap back when someone my age frustrates you. We do things our way because it is the way most comfortable to us. That is why I wrote these essays. They might help you get what people my age are about and they certainly help me realize how different the world is today.
The generation gap has been around ever since Adam and Eve left the garden, but in the twenty-first century it is wider than ever. Each person is unique and each one of us has our own idiosyncrasies. I am a single woman; I am American. My frame of reference is my own. I can only tell you my own experiences, but there are certain commonalities all people my age share. Hopefully, my answers to your questions will help you understand and even forgive the older people you see every day for annoying the hell out of you.
Lynn Ruth Miller
2012
