by PHILOMENA DUMBROWSKI-MANISCHEVITS, Alternate Reality News Service Unintended Consequences Writer
Old people – you gotta love ’em. Especially if you’re related to them. Or you’re living with them. Or both. Or both and they owe you money. Or both and you hope they leave you a metric sheepton of money when they shuffleboard off this mortal coil (maybe that last trip to the Catskills wasn’t such a great idea). Especially especially if you hope they leave you money when they Shuffle Demons off this mortal coil (teaching a relative to appreciate the saxophone is always a good idea).
But one of the drawbacks of getting older, a drawback that can be fatal if your job is juggling chainsaws, is that our memories change to conform to the way we would have liked our lives to go rather than how they actually went.
Through most of history, if Uncle Ingemar (he was soooooo dramatic!) wanted to remember the day when, at the tender age of 37, he kicked the Tsar in the shins, the only people who could tell him that, actually, he missed the Tsar and kicked the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in the privates were his parents, who had taken him to the event. But of course, they would have been long dead, so they could only tell him that in his dreams, which they never did because they were too busy hitting each other in the face with fruit pies.
Your dreams don’t get more normal as you get older.
As it did with so much, the internet changed this. When people started obsessively documenting their lives online, it made it impossible for them to misremember their youth because the evidence of what they actually did was there for anybody with a grudge and a high speed modem to see. For instance, when your grandmother tells you that she invented knitting, the internet tells you that knitting probably started in Egypt in the 11th or 12th century, and you’re pretty sure she never lived in the Middle East.
Or your Grandpa Ebenezer (after one Christmas when he inexplicably became a decent human again and was accepted back into the family) will tell you that he was a heckraiser when he was your age. His high school yearbook, on the other hand, will tell you that he was voted Most Likely to Induce a Coma in a Firecracker.
“Whatever you do, don’t -” started marine psychiatrist Edwina Humblepott.
When you show him the version of his high school yearbook that you found online, Uncle Ebenezer pouts and looks at you like he filled his child diaper (he always had small hips) hours ago and nobody has come to change it.
“That. Don’t do that,” Humblepott belatedly advised.
There’s no harm in your mother claiming she slept with a member of the Rolling Stones, even if her Farcebook page shows that she actually went to a concert by a cover band called the Stalling Rowans, Humblepott stated. If your father wants to liven a family get-together…he probably shouldn’t insist that it be held in a funeral home. That notwithstanding, if he wants to liven said family get-together with stories of fighting the Huns, what’s the point of pointing at his TwitherdY feed to show that, in fact, he was rejected by the army because of his brewer’s elbow (an incurable, and incurably romantic disease)?
“Old people have little left to look forward to, so many of them look back,” Humblepott explained. “Imagine their surprise when they discover that their past wasn’t so hot, either. Can you blame them if they want to…spice it up a bit? I can’t.”
Humblepott is the author of the book The Biddies Are Alright, which explores the plight of the elderly in the wake of social media. “The essentialist dichotomy between the is and the wants to be is resolved online by the digital ridiculous,” she writes. I think that her point is that the internet mocks our ideas of what memory can be. Maybe. Okay, I’m not really sure – perhaps a passage later in the – no, that makes even less sense. Possibly on page 367 – no, the book is only 343 pages long.
I asked Humblepott what people should do when youngsters want to point out the difference between what their elders tell them happened and what the internet tells them happened. “Warn them that they will be old some day, and they should give old people the grace that they hope young people will give them.”
Does it work with young people? Humblepott answered: “Did it work for us?”