Saturday, February 6th, 2010...6:05 am
My eighty-two year old grandfather recently had his birth certificate denied for the first time in his entire life. Sometimes, I see clear evidence to the redundancy that is bureaucracy. He went to the Post Office to get a new passport, but the Einstein behind the counter would not accept the evidence to suggest that, at some point in history, my Pa had biologically arrived.
“You have to be kidding me?” my mother, apparently, exclaimed. “What is wrong with it?”
“It was registered two months before he was born.”
Sometimes it takes us a life time to work out the simplest mistakes.
Getting reissued with a new birth certificate when you are very well into middle age is easy enough, even if it is a little ludicrous and very annoying. But that is life isn’t it? Simple things often seem stupid and definitely frustrating but, in hindsight, we just have to laugh at them.
“Is Pa magic?” I asked. Sincerely. That would be a cool story.
My family is full of quirky people who teach me interesting lessons. Whether it is learning that my Pa was capable of notifying the government of his impending birth before he had entered the world, my brother’s insight into modern man’s brain or my mothers ability to drink an entire bottle of wine in one sitting and still care that the floor needs vacuuming, I have always known that I don’t have to look far from my family tree to get a good view of the ridiculous. While my friends Nanna’s were baking them cookies, mine was chain-smoking and reading me passages from conspiracy theory books while she babysat me as a child. I am not kidding and I see nothing wrong with it. The apple did not fall far from the tree.
As a family is made up of multiple generations, multiple ideals and, hopefully, multiple bloodlines, I have always enjoyed looking at the melting pot of humanity that is forced to spend Christmas Day and similar together and love to compare the hindsight of the elderly to the insight of the rest. My Nanna doesn’t know what an Internet is. But she could tell you every single thing that [apparently] happened to John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. It is this kind of accumulation of knowledge that makes me excited to grow old. Because, it seems, wisdom is more evidence to a life well lived than a birth certificate ever will be.
People often discount the insight of the young.
“What could they possibly know?” the elderly ask, three hundred years into a seemingly never-ending lifespan.
“Well, they know how to use Google, so you would probably be surprised,” I have responded.
My brother, an accumulation of eighteen-years of life that could be the very definition of perfection, became my oracle on all things masculine when he was just fifteen years old. I have always suspected that he was smarter than me. I just thought I had until I was, at least, thirty to convince everyone otherwise. He was a teen and entering the dating world when I was starting to think that it was all one big conspiracy.
He had just met a girl and boasted for days about how much he liked her.
“So, have you called her yet?” I asked.
“No. I am have been busy.”
He was fifteen. What was he possibly busy doing? Other than masturbating?
“But you like her. Why don’t you call her?”
“Yeah. I will. When I have time.”
“So you’re lack of communication has nothing to do with your attraction to the girl?”
“Nope.”
I couldn’t help but think that, you know, somewhere throughout history, things like Hollywood had lied to me. It proved to me that young people should trust their own knowledge a little bit more.
The insight into how a young boys mind worked changed how I looked at the boys I was dating. Sorry, men. Oh, who am I kidding? Boys. They weren’t ignoring me. They didn’t find me ridiculous. They didn’t forget about me. They just had a life. Such a reality had never occurred to me before. Mainly, I think, because there is often little evidence that they boys I date actually have one. Or, you know, because I didn’t want to acknowledged that they existed in a world outside of me. Suddenly knowing that they did made me anxiety free. Cigarette companies must have noticed a drop in shares that you couldn’t even read about.
Eventually, as I got older, I started to notice that a few boys did think horrible things about me. There was clear evidence. Like, for example, some told me. Things started to become very confusing until I realized that different opinions are what make life interesting. Not having every human being think I was fabulous made me layered. And instigated self reflection to see how I perceived myself. I was forced to work out how to trust what I already knew just from living.
There is, I think, only one thing that truly separates the old from the young. Insecurity. I don’t think I know a wrinkled person who cares what other people think of them. I don’t think I know a young person who doesn’t. Old people look back on mistakes and laugh about them. Young people dwell on them. Part of me wonders if just living through years is the magic which kills self-doubt. And part of me knows that it is wisdom which boosts self confidence. It is the interim of dating, relationships and living that make us question who we really are and ignore the realities that can be denied by so many. But if a birth certificate can be wrong for your whole life, isn’t that evidence to the fact that everything you know could be wrong also?
It sounds ridiculous to think that we care more about how other people perceive our life than how our life actually is, but that seems to be the case. Google does not have a self-reflection application. But, if one bothers to open their mind and find out who they are for themselves, I don’t think you can deny it is the passport to wisdom and knowing that you are alive. It seems so stupid but, really, it is easy enough.