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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Living a half-century leaves
you older but not wiserNext week I will, or at least hope to, reach the anniversary of having lived on this earth for a half-century. That seems to me to be a long time to occupy a tiny piece of real estate in a far corner of the cosmos. And you'd think that a 50-year-old conscious, sentient, semialert being would accumulate a certain amount of wisdom in that span of time, wisdom that he might share with the youngsters to make their lives a little safer, happier and more meaningful. I mean, when I was a tike there were geezers all over the place trying to give me the benefit of their experiences.
One ancient specimen, for instance, had vast encyclopedic knowledge of the wants and needs of women -- all of it wrong, it turns out -- that he insisted on sharing with me. Had I acted on even one of his insights, I would have been beaten to a pulp by some young woman's daddy or brother, or I would have been incarcerated on a number of sex-related crimes. How this oracle of knowledge, that font of information on the nature of womanhood, escaped the hoosegow for so many decades is a mystery.
Now that geezerhood is at my doorstep, I feel a certain obligation to bore the young with platitudes, to bathe them in the light of my sagacity only to discover, sadly, that the candlepower of my sagacity is more along the lines of a Zippo lighter than lighthouse beam. To put it bluntly, I'm pretty much the same knucklehead at 50 that I was at 18, only less agile and more brittle.
Nevertheless, if I were forced to dredge up a few words of wisdom for those whose future is still ahead of them (my own future is receding at a frightening rate), those words of wisdom would be these: Be careful.
I KNOW IT sounds stupid, but, trust me, just about every bad thing that ever happened to me -- and, man, they could fill barrels -- happened because I wasn't being careful.
I've still got a lump on my forehead from falling off the top of a playground slide onto solid concrete in kindergarten when we lived in Morocco. In a country largely covered with sand, I managed to find the only hard surface on which to land head-first simply because I wasn't being careful.
Had I made being careful a foundation of my early life, I would have avoided an amazing catalog of cuts, bruises, dislocations, sub hematomas, sprains, seeping wounds, contusions, cranial trauma and, worst of all, heartbreak of the romantic variety.
Now, granted, you can still get hurt when you're being careful. But it takes a certain lack of appreciation of danger to see who can stand on a railroad track the longest with the train approaching at high speed, or date a girl whose boot soles still contain the residue of other hearts she's stomped on. But I know that I would have shed a lot less blood and fewer tears had I been a little more careful. (An incident concerning opening a can of paint with a rusty screwdriver comes to mind during which I shed both.)
But being careful is a good thing. It can save you from everything from running out of gas to running out of ideas, which, to a writer, are pretty much the same thing. I've been told that being careful is more fun and less painful than not being careful, and I plan to employ that strategy during my next half-century.
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com