When I was little, my parents, grandparents, and aunts (one of who lived well past 100) all knew everything. That was how the world seemed to work when I was in kindergarten through junior high school. Having zoomed past another birthday two days ago, I realize that old people don’t know everything and it’s not because of dementia but because they never broke the code.
One thing I do know is that the person who promised her Bitcoin (whatever that is) dealings had been so successful along with winning a suitcase of lottery money, that she could finally send me “a car for people who thought they would ultimately know everything.” Sadly, the car never arrived and her phone number has been changed to some communal phone at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York. Here’s the photo she sent me before entering the slammer. If you have to ask what it is and/or how much it costs, it’s not the car for you.
One thing you discover with age is that the stuff you believed 50 years ago that everyone else thought was nonsense has now become the latest fad. People tell me I’m too old to understand it. I say, “I understood it before you were born.” They reply, “So you’re a guru, then, and know everything.” In response, I say, “Nathaniel Hawthorne was right when he said, ‘A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.”
Other than that, I can’t say that I don’t know anything other than my wife’s name, where I parked the car, and that I can’t keep putting a lot of Tabasco Sauce on my food including the food of love where I don’t play on, I get heartburn.
I strongly suspect that–due to my belief in the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics–that many of us don’t live in the universe where were started out. But I can never quite catch the change happening. The only clue is today’s history classes that no longer teach things I remember happening. In today’s universe, perhaps they didn’t, or else we’ve sanitized it out of existence. The chart shown here seems self-evident, so I won’t waste time going back to the work of folks like Niels Bohr and Max Planck. I’ll note that I really like Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle because the older one gets, the less certainty s/he has about everything.
I’m certain about one thing. When you’re my age, you don’t know everything such as the speed and location of an electron. I strongly suspect that this is the new way of the world, one (e.g.) when even Senators and Congressmen/Women don’t simultaneously know the location of their asses and the nearest hole in the ground. This has caused a lot of polarization between the two major parties.
So there it is. As you approach my age (classified) you’ll discover that you don’t know everything, contrary to what you thought would happen when you were ten years old. I can tell you one thing: if you embrace uncertainty, you’ll need fewer Xanax or Ativan prescriptions.
I don’t even know where my cat is.
–Malcolm
Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Conjure Woman’s Cat” a novel that shows us what we know and what we don’t know.
When I was a kid, “old people” (like my grandpa) always told me not to take any wooden nickles. When I was in grade school, I thought that was a joke. As I got older, I figured out that “wooden nickles” generally referred to one kind of scam or another even though such coins had in the old days been issued as company tokens or script.
Sometime between 70 and 100, we lose track of well-known people if they’ve retired. When Sophia Loren starred in “The Life Ahead” last year, people had to reassess, deciding that (a) she’s not dead, (b) “out of it,” and (c) “still has it.” Good for her, people were saying.
Malcolm's Round Table 