Hello to all,
Recently, another author posted a meme stating Grammarly doesn’t like the term “old man.” I posted a humorous comment about preferring old fart, which garnered several laughing emojis. I can attest in this blog that Grammarly does, in fact, take exception to using old man in a sentence. Grammarly considers the term disrespectful to some people. My best guess is that stubborn men refuse to see they are getting old.
An old saying states you can tell if you are old by when you fall. If people around you laugh, you are not old. If they rush over to help you up with concern on their face, you are old. I discovered my oldness when slipping on the ice while retrieving the mail at work six years ago. A nice young woman, my best guess is age 25, stopped her car, ran over to me, and helped me up. She called me sir three or four times while brushing the snow off my coat.
I also noticed younger people opening and holding the door for me about the time of my fall. They see the white goatee shining even through the darkest night and make it a point to be respectful of the old man approaching. This disturbed me at first because I was the one holding the door for my elders. Then I remembered youth when I called a thirty-fivish woman “mam,” and she took exception. It was the way I was raised that was my defense.
Like me, the young men and women holding the door for me show respect for the generation that preceded them. Their parents drilled this into their psyche from a very young age. I remembered my mother flicking the back of my head with her bony finger when I failed to show respect for an old man. While typing this memory, my head stung from all the time she needed to remind me.
Yesterday, I wore my white tennis shoes with Velcro straps while running errands. My outfit screamed old man coming, and many people younger than me held the door, some from more than twenty feet away. It pleases this old man’s heart to see Generation Z paying respect to an old boomer like me. All is not lost in this modern world.
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God bless,
Danny Mac
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