Want to hear a good story? Listen to your elders…

Out on the beach today, I saw an old guy sitting in a wheelchair, staring out at the surging ocean. The waves off Daytona Beach were crashing loudly just 50 feet out, but by the time they reached the wheels of his chair they were just harmless bubbles and foam. He sat there for some time, and I wondered what was going through his mind.

Likely, he was wondering how it has all come to this – sitting in a chair and staring at the ocean instead of plunging headlong into the oncoming waves. Perhaps he had been a championship swimmer or a surfer dude in the 1950s. Perhaps he stormed a beach in France and can never shake those gruesome memories. No doubt he saw the hard, fit bodies of the young men and women running and playing around him and remembered his own halcyon days of summer. But I’ll never know what he was thinking because I didn’t ask him. I just saw him as “an old guy in a wheelchair.”

I am (hopefully) somewhere in the middle of life, numerically speaking (if I live to be 102!), but there are days I feel closer to the old guy in the wheelchair than I do the young people around him, and all this got me thinking about how much time I spend (or don’t spend) listening to the stories of the older people in my life.

I’m reading Sara Gruen’s wonderfully enchanting novel, “Water for Elephants,” right now, and she’s got me thinking about all the stories there are out there, lingering in nursing homes and retirement villages and senior citizens clubs. I love a good story, and I’m afraid I may be missing some exceptional ones.

“Water for Elephants” begins with this memorable and very funny first line: “I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” No doubt our memories fail us all from time to time as we get older, and that’s all the more reason to consider the importance of harvesting, cherishing and celebrating the stories of the older people in our lives.

Jacob Jankowski, the narrator of “Water for Elephants,” lives in an “assisted living facility,” but thankfully spends much of his time dreaming and daydreaming about his life in a traveling circus as a young man, and the stories we are privy to in his memory give us an entrance to a world we may have otherwise never seen. That’s the power of story.

His family visits him weekly (his son is in his 70s, which made me smile just thinking such a thing…) and tries to convince him to play bingo with the others. “Doesn’t it sound like fun?” they ask. He answers: “Sure…maybe if you’re a rutabaga.” I love this crusty old guy. But he goes on to reflect more seriously on his inability to talk to his family and share his stories:

My platitudes don’t hold their interest and I can hardly blame them for that. My real stories are all out of date. So what if I can speak firsthand about the Spanish Flu, the advent of the automobile, world wars, cold wars, and Sputnik – that’s all ancient history now. But what else do I have to offer? Nothing happens to me anymore. That’s the reality of getting old, and I guess that’s the crux of the matter. I’m not ready to be old yet.

The truth is, we often don’t pay much attention to the old people in our lives who sit staring out at the ocean. And the loss is twofold:  We don’t ask them to tell their stories, and we run the risk of those stories being lost forever. We don’t ask them to tell their stories, and we don’t give them the gift of being able to tell their stories. Everyone loses when stories aren’t shared and passed on.

If we think they have nothing to share we’re kidding ourselves and selling them short. Imagine the lives they have lived and the stories they could tell if only someone was listening (and maybe writing them down). Imagine the thundering waves of stories aching to be told and the tragedy of stories that peter out like a wave reaching a deserted beach…harmless bubbles and foam.