Written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge,
where we are taking a rather broad look at
AGE-ING, and the relationship between
generations. This is my story.
My knees gave up on hiking sometime around 2018. My back made its feelings known about gardening the following spring. And last summer, my grandson Wyatt tried to teach me pickleball, which I will simply describe as a near-death experience for everyone involved.
But I can still do plenty.
I can sit in the den for hours while my granddaughter Mckenna teaches me to crochet, and I will make something that is technically a rectangle and emotionally a disaster, and we will laugh until we can’t breathe. I can watch those true crime shows with her …. the ones her mother doesn’t know about …. and argue loudly about who the killer was, and I am usually right, because at my age I have seen a lot of human nature.
I can tell my grandson Lucan about the summer I was seventeen, which, depending on which version I tell, is either a cautionary tale or the greatest adventure of the twentieth century. He sets up the recording on his phone before I even sit down.
I can still cook. And teenagers, it turns out, will sit with you for a very long time if there is food involved. They’ll talk. They’ll tell you things they won’t tell their parents. The trick is to keep stirring and not look too interested.
And conversations …. oh, we have conversations. About everything. Music I don’t understand, friends, school, the state of the world and the state of my generation, which they find historically fascinating and also a little embarrassing. Fair enough.
I cannot run with them. I cannot climb with them.
But I can show up. I can pay attention. I can make them feel, for a few hours on a Sunday, like the most interesting people alive.
Which, for the record, they are.
NAR©2026
This is “I Don’t Need Your Rockin’ Chair” by George Jones
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
The Elephant's Trunk 