Is there a felt need to be able to talk across time, to people of other generations? Maybe not, because maybe people think it’s so hopeless they suppress any spark of hope. “I don’t care to talk to young punks.” Like how, before women’s liberation gave hope, we suppressed sparks of outrage at sexism.
It’s easy to avoid other ages and genders. I remember when we said, “Never trust anyone over thirty!” During my college years I could relate to newly hopeful feminists not wanting (enemy) men around: my college counsellor once leaned forward sympathetically to say, “For you, parents would be the enemy.” I guess the only solution, for me and outraged women, was time.
A song by Three Dog Night goes, “…easy to be hard, easy to be cold, how can people have no feelings…” Is that us, as senior citizens?
I have a poem about survivors of the War of the Worlds gratefully resting inside a tavern —one man briefly leaves because of sudden PTSD, but he comes back and resumes drinking— and the last line of the poem is, “Look, there’s little Molly at the door, holding daisies.” (Link)
The first step to talking across the generations is to be like the “ancient mariner” who, after surviving a harsh realm, is delighting in all living creatures. Or, as in my poem, delighting in little Molly.
The thing to bear in mind is that young people genuinely expect people to like them, and expect to like others. Meanwhile, we lean over over our beers, frowning and careworn, saying “Only the good die young.”
I smile to remember two young ladies putting their bags at one of several round tables, just as I too was sitting down, at the far end of an empty movie lobby. What they didn’t know was that I had followed them inside doing my own dad joke —and the very definition of a “dad joke,” besides being corny, is that it’s mostly private— I had positioned myself out so that we were walking along at identical two yard intervals. Right up until we took separate tables, who would know we weren’t together? On some mission of our own?
Imagine one young lady, early-twenties, glancing at me and thinking, “Better ignore him, because with his white hair he is probably some sour old guy who chooses books over graphic novels, (I do) literature instead of a junk best-seller, (often) the sort who would name a place in California a “jet propulsion laboratory” because “rocket lab” sounds like an outer space fantasy. In short, a man who would be very judgemental of any young men or women who would rather watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch than the World Series.” (I hope to find a DVD of Sabrina one day)
I typically advise travellers to dress like a tacky tourist or be wearing a lapel pin or something, so folks know you are in a tourist-type, meet-the-locals mood. Still standing, the young woman smiled broadly at my Japanese baseball cap: “You’re wearing Totoro!”
And I replied, “You’re wearing a Doctor Who belt!” I reached into my jeans to pull out a Tardis billfold. “For carrying my bus pass in London.”
We talked. Deciding I wasn’t too disapproving after all, she reached into her paper bag to share her happiness: “I was shopping for comic books.” She was pleased with her loot.
I advise those who are too self conscious, too modest, too mind-goes-blank to connect with a local, to “think of how you might be helpful.” That day I helped by noticing her belt and delighting in her loot and by sharing, as one nerd to another, my dad joke of walking along “with” them. And since she had been to London, I helped by telling of a fancy Who Shop complete with a museum of BBC Doctor Who props donated for charity. “You enter the exotic museum through… a blue phone booth in the corner!” —And hey, my distinguished Oxford English Dictionary has “Tardis”! (But not the USS “Enterprise”)…
I notice I’m talking with exclamation marks, like a young person, but isn’t that the point? To temporarily cross the time barrier to be young? Like having fun using chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant you would never use at home?
As long as you are being yourself, of course: You won’t catch me saying “groovy”
Today, Japanese Manga (comics) and Anime (cartoons) are something that the young have discovered. At the weekend Japanese convention, my English professor’s middle aged wife was not disregarded by the young people, nor scorned, nor a spectacle: they were surprised and delighted that she cared about their culture, and eagerly showed her around.
For encounters at the office water cooler, I skim the newspaper sports section. I especially skim the popular culture section but I don’t expect other seniors to. Because to connect with the rainbow of decades it’s enough to be friendly, helpful and nonjudgmental. Then somehow it all works out… Hurray!
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Sean Crawford
Cow Town, east of Banff
November
2025
Essay note: You “think by writing”: I had never defined “dad joke,” a term I keep seeing in print lately, until I composed this piece.
My two essays on how a tourist can talk to locals: smaller condensed one, longer original one.
If you don’t mind a re-run, on my blog for December 30th, the BBC ran a story about a family that set a supper plate every Christmas for their missing mother. Hence I posted a related TV clip, from Doctor Who.
But since I just can’t manage to post the Youtube, here’s my blog post URL
