...you used to hate to hear people talk about old times?

It used to drive me crazy to hear my grandparents ramble on about the way things used to be. Now I wish I could go back and ask them more questions. I could much better understand what they were really trying to say now. All I heard was that things cost more than they used to, and that everybody had to work harder in the old days. There was much more beneath the surface that I didn't get. And young people still don't get that. I guess that's a pattern that will never change.

 

I am fascinated by the lives of my elders and pepper them with questions whenever possible. I wish i knew i was going to feel this way.I would have appreciated the stories much more when i was a kid

 

I was raised by my gramma and got a few stories,but not nearly enough. I was too interested in me,I guess. I wish I could have her back--we have an interesting family history and now lots of it is missing. She was born when the indian wars were still going on in 1884. Listen to the old ones--you won't regret it later like I do.

 

I always loved it.

 

i loved it as well, I miss my grandma like crazy and would give anything to hear her tell me more stories. I actually live my life by the philosophy that everything I do better make a damn good story to tell my grandkids. Anytime I'm debating on whether or not to do something, i ask myself if it will make a good story in 50 years and if the answer is yes, then I do that shit!

 

I wish I could go back and record some of my Grandpa's old stories. He grew up in Alaska so some of the stories were pretty wild. Like sleeping outside in a sleeping bag when it was 40 below zero, grizzlies, nearing getting eaten alive by mosquitos(literally)....

 

I've often thought that to go to old age homes or real old people in general and tape them telling stories of their lives would/could be real interesting. You never know what people have done or been thru. There's something to learn and/or enjoy from almost anyone.

 

i used to volunteer at two different nursing homes. There was a lady at one who was 100 years old who used to tell me about her french lover and how he curled her toes (her words). Later on i found out her french lover lived in the alzheimers ward at the other nursing home. He was a good 20 years younger than her and would occasionally unleash physical attacks on the nurses and volunteers lol. you should do that scratcho, you would probably get some amazing stories from people.

 

I know. Son has a video cam.I'm thinking about it. I read all the obits and wonder what/where these people have been and done.

 

Probably hate it more now that I know it was the same kind of bullshit act for the kids they do today.


Used to hear all the crap from other family members that it wasnt like this back in our day, people respected marriage more etc, wasnt any free love yada yada.

My paternal Grandfather was 38 when he married for the first time ( at a time when supposedly everyone was getting married at 19 cos that was the only option ), when he died his personal photo album surfaced, he was a drummer in a jazz band before WW2, then still single for about 13 years after the war. The album contained hundreds of pictures of him with different girls often in provocative poses, hundreds of girls before and after the war. An album kept in a safety deposit box along with his war medals, assumedly so the wife had no clue, even though she would have had to wonder why he'd never been married before 38.

Even with my own mother, got the speil that mommy and daddy love each other very much, they were each others one an only, even though I had a fair idea why my birthday was 7 months after their wedding when I was little, wasnt till decades later when they split up I got the real story. That she was seeing / more in love with another guy as well as my dad, wasnt sure who the father was at the time, married my dad cos the other guy wouldnt and pretty much regretted doing so the whole time.


Anyway its all BS, the 1920s were probably more decadent than this decade is. And this generation is going to do it to, 20 years from now no soccer mom is going to tell her kids in college a few times she got totally hammered and did half the football team

 

My sister actually started recording her conversations with my Grandfather before he passed. She took these recordings and wrote everything out and two years ago all of us got a nice bound book of his stories, from his first 11 years in the Netherlands and the trip over when they immigrated in the early 30's up until about the mid 50's.

What a wonderful gift. And now we have them forever.

 

I#ve always quite liked people talking about the past, mostly because I'd liked to have been alve in the late 60 and 70s

 

Yep same, all the stories i've heard from my grandparents as well as my parents makes me want to go back.

Most of the stories i've been told are very interesting, or hilarious because those things can't possible happen in todays times.

Life seemed much simpler back then, hard work, but a more simply of life. Things are crazy and out of control now.

 

Sometimes a thing seems really intriguing and interesting indeed but in reality I don't dig it at all. Talking about old times with old people is a good example for me. Of course it also depends on the person you talk to

 

KJ, dont really see what was cynical about that post.

With both situations, with my mother and grandfather, it was presented to me one way, then decades later I found it was pretty much the opposite


Maybe thats why young people "still dont get that", because they get told fairytales that arent true

 

quite correct indeed vanilla gorilla!

having lived through the 1960's and 1970's... NO FUCKING WAY WOULD I EVER WANT TO GO THROUGH THEM AGAIN!

as for the "great stories" elders tell about "the good old days"... THAT IS PURE BULLSHIT!

the record of history shows that "the good old days" were really quite shitty to live through.

you can't trust peoples' memories for accuracy.
what my parents and grandparents told me about "the good old days" did never match up with the facts of that period in history.

the 1960's here in the u.s.a. were walking on egg shells. the country almost went into a full scale civil war and/or revolution.
in the 1970's starting with richard nixon, was the first steps in dismantling the new deal and, taking us back to the guilded age. the end result of the last 40 years of moving back into a new guilded age is, taking the u.s.a. from a 1st. world nation back to a 2nd. or 3rd. world nation. of the 18th. and 19th. centuries.
:ack2:

NO! things were not so great in the "good old days!"

 

I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S WRONG WITH KIDS THESE DAYS! BY GOLLY WHEN I WAS A KID I HAD TO WALK NINE MILES A DAY TO GO TO SCHOOL! NINE MILES A DAY!!! AND YOU KIDS THINK YOU GOT IT SO TOUGH!

-Seriously, I knew an old guy who would ramble just like that after a few drinks.

 

yeah, my old man was that way too.
he told us about the 20 miles he had to walk every day to school in 3 feet of snow, in -40 degree weather in his bare feet during the depression in the 1930's and, what ungratefull lazy slackers we kids are today... BULLSHIT!
the grammer school was 1/2 a block from his house and, the high school was a couple of miles from where he lived, and -40 degrees in bare feet... how stupid did he think we kids were?
i spent the first 10 years of my life in minnesota.
anyone who would be dumb enough to pull a stunt like that in a minnesota winter, would wind up having their feet ambutated with in one hour due to extreme frostbite and gangrene!

some elder people, are just so full of shit that, the whites of their eyes are brown.

 

Maybe this is just some kind of Australian cultural thing that I don't understand, but it seems to me that you never miss a chance to bring up something that somebody has done to disappoint you. It isn't good to dwell on that sort of stuff all the time. I could have started a thread about everything my grandparents ever did that bugged me, but what would be the point? They've been dead for years. It's long past time to get over it.

I don't remember anybody from their generation ever talking about relationship issues. In the American South, people from their generation mostly talked about the more impersonal aspects of life that they all had in common.

I don't think they told me anything that wasn't true about what it was like to drive a primitive car (hand-crank starter, spoke wheels, no heat, oil lantern headlights) on a muddy road in the middle of nowhere. I think they were very honest about how often they had to dig a new pit, relocate their outhouse in the back yard, and cover the old pit with dirt. On winter mornings when they took the chamber pots out back to be emptied, sometimes the piss in the outhouse pit would be frozen over. When they wanted to communicate with someone, they had to mail a letter or go see them in person. Sending for a doctor (house calls only) was something you did only if you thought you were near death. In summer, they kept their food cold in an ice box, not a refrigerator. The iceman delivered big blocks of ice in a horse-drawn wagon.

No American alive today knows what it is like to live that way.

From their perspective, a lot of the things that people worry about today would surely seem like bullshit. (Can't get a great WiFi signal at the local coffee shop? It's not going to kill you. And why are you paying someone to make your coffee?) It would be like talking to someone from another planet.

Teenagers today don't know how it feels to worry about your car breaking down on the highway and having to walk a long way to use a phone. They take auto reliability and cell phones (and every other modern thing) for granted, which often leads to a foolish and unappealing sense of entitlement. It is better to understand where we have come from and appreciate what we have.

Yeah, I don't get much out of listening to old-timers who want to convince me that everything used to be better than it is now. Some things were better. Some things were worse. Everything was different.

You want to know what the civil rights movement was really like? Ask an honest, elderly black person who remembers having to find a "colored only" public restroom or water fountain in the South. Ask them how white people used to treat them. Much better than reading the story from a boring history book.

 

While I would never want to live in those times I’d like to visit them if it were possible :2thumbsup:

Maybe go back to 1930s Mississippi; flirt with some white girl, then return to the present with the Klan in hot pursuit carrying a rope tied into a hangman’s noose


Hotwater