“What? Yeah, I think I switched past it,” she said. “Who was
that? Rory
Calhoun?”
“Nah,” I said. “Stewart
Granger.”
We both laughed. “Same thing,” she said.
“I’ll say,” I said. “I think they were the same person.
Maybe he was Rory Calhoun on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, and Stewart
Granger on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.”
Now we were both laughing like idiots.
Off in the corner there was a table of younger staff
members, listening to us. They stared at us as if we were patients in an
asylum. We were aware of them. But we kept laughing. No, more than that: we
laughed even harder because they were staring at us.
Questions:
·
Does any of the above make any sense to you?
·
Do you
know who Rory Calhoun was, or Stewart Granger?
·
Does “Turner Classic” mean anything to you?
It’s a habit of the elderly to mumble and cackle over the
past. But this is a game we elderly people like to play: making reference to
things that happened long before the other people in the room were born. It’s a
way of getting even with those young people, with their music and their slang
and their television programs that we’ve never heard of, and their texting
jargon that we still haven’t quite figured out.
This is one of the great pleasures of the elderly: to make
younger people uncomfortable.
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