Hi, One thing I've noticed about myself in the last year or so.... I can barely stand the tv shows that are available today and found myself longing for the tv of the "good old days". I find myself gravitating toward the tv shows that were available back in the 1980s and 1970s. NetFlix has a pretty good assortment as well as Amazon Prime. If I remember correctly, my grandparents did the same thing! I would want to watch some "modern" show and they wanted to watch Lawrence Welk or some cowboy and indian show. I would just roll my eyes! I also have a hard time finding something comfortable to sit in. I am like Goldilocks and drift from chair to chair around my house to try to get comfortable. I have finally resigned myself to the fact that I need a recliner. So somehow, I've become my grandparents where I need to watch old tv shows in a recliner!
Now I'm feeling old. I was in high school before we had television and, even then, there was only one channel that we could get reliably, so I seldom watched it. My memories are of listening to radio shows, which I preferred to the music. My mother's parents outlived her, but I don't believe that any of my grandparents had a television.
Unfortunately, I never knew my grandparents - but I do find myself doing and saying things that my parents did. Yikes - I swore I would never do that. Kind of scary, isn't?? You know, I don't think of myself as old, but when I open my mouth and my mother's voice comes out, it really hits me - I am getting old!! Of course, my son's eyes rolling every time I open my mouth having me feeling pretty old, too!
Yikes! Well, my grandparents started out with no television, just radio, if that. But eventually they moved up to TV. We had one black and white TV while I was growing up and me and my siblings were the channel changers. I used to get so mad when the only choices were baseball, Wild Kingdom and a Billie Graham crusade because of course, there were only 3 channels. I was a kid, I wanted something fun to watch! Of course, now I really admire Billie Graham, he is a good man.
My grandmother on my mother's side outlived my other grandparents by quite a few years, and she may have had a television near the end. If so, she kept it hidden, as some people did at that time, because I would play cards and dominoes with her often and don't remember ever seeing a television.
To be truthful, I might be doing what they did nearly every day. I think and speak about the past a lot. The key note with me is I can only remember so much and then I get a lot of blank spaces so I kind of try to fill in the gaps. Like, i can only remember about 3 months of a 12 month tour in Vietnam. Maybe that's a good thing. Also, about 30 something years ago I had a minor stroke and a small part of my memories took a vacation and only left me with a deserted beach with no cabana and no hula girls. Us guys gotta have hula girls or something like that in our "younger" stories, but mine just went to powder their noses and didn't come back. Now it's just tall tales and no tall tails in the memory banks. One of the saddest times I can remember was just a few months ago. I and my wife were sitting at a Veterans clinic. I kept looking at the other veterans and imagining what they were like when they were young, strong and healthy soldiers, instead of the older version they had become. Then I thought about myself and made the astounding observation that someone might be looking at me thinking the same thing. I am sure, like in Peter Pan, there is really a younger person in there somewhere, but I just can't find him anymore. Maybe my grandparents did just that. Maybe they (sadly) liked to look at other people their own ages and wondered what they were like when they were kids and reminisce about their own young lives as well. I do it quite often, but I do not stand in front of the mirror very much. I get reminded in a visual sense how much different I really am from the young, "me."
Speaking of vets and being old... I recently took my 92 year old step-dad to get groceries. He stopped driving over the summer because he knew he should. I teased him at the grocery store about being the oldest person in the store! Seriously, he probably was. He was a WWII vet and boy, does he have some stories to tell. He surely was part of the Greatest Generation. He gets a lot of admiring glances when he wears his WWII veteran cap.
I learned so much from my grandparents that I can't imagine not doing things they did. It was my grandad who introduced me to horses as a child. He loved them as much as I do. From my grandmother I learned to enjoy cooking and planting a little garden. Both enjoyed reading immensely, as do I also. In temperament, too, I believe I take after them more than I did either of my parents. Particularly, I am much like my grandmother in being quiet and contented at home or outside. Not so much interested in being around a lot of noise or large crowds.
I don't know that it fits into the topic of doing things as my grandparents did, although I can't think of anything that my maternal grandparents did that I'd be averse to. As I mentioned in another post, I never knew my paternal grandparents, although I spent most of my life believing I had. After my (maternal) grandfather sold his IGA store, he would make Christmas wreaths and other Christmas decorations out of cedar. He also sold the cedar branches themselves, probably to a larger operation that did the same thing. He had a delivery truck, the size of a large U-haul truck, probably left over from his IGA business. I went with him several times to cut cedar in the winter. Since everyone was related in the area that I grew up in, there wasn't much in the way of concern over who owned the land you were on. Maybe he had asked permission, I don't know, but we'd drive to several different places and using snowshoes and a box sleigh that we'd pull behind us, go out into the woods cutting cedar branches, never very many from any one tree. They were stacked flat onto the sleigh, and piled high, held down with twine. Once we got a full sleigh, we'd bring it back and load it into the back of the truck. It was a long day, but he told stories the entire time, and I loved it. Grandma would have a large supper prepared, and we'd play dominoes afterwards.