I started off the day with my weekly Toastmasters meeting, which is less nerdy than it may seem to outsiders. Try it out, if you’d like to get better at communicating and speaking in public. It’s a very social thing and you get to meet people from all walks of life, although most of the members are usually above 30. Most of the people in my club have husbands, wives, kids, mortgages, the sort of thing that is foreign to most if not all of my contemporaries and myself. I can remember when my dad was my age. I remember walking around Sears around that time, him, my brother and I. My father had bought us each a padded satin jacket, and we wore them proudly. My brother wearing the navy and silver of the Dallas Cowboys while I sported the light blue of the Houston Oilers. My kid timeline seems to be running behind schedule.
People of my generation are waiting longer to have children and get married, if they do it at all. There seems to be a general sense of avoidance about these once ubiquitous facts of life. Is it too foreign or painful or precarious a subject to even consider realistically? Is it because many of us are the children of parents who dissolved their marriages in divorce and acrimony? Are we stuck in an extended state of adolescence? Or, has marriage become superfluous? That seems unlikely in an age where homosexuals fight for the right to legally marry. I could go on.
Anyway, the meeting went well, although I still haven’t gotten over my serious sense of nervousness that makes me freeze up for painful seconds whenever I have to get up there and try to speak. As someone who is fairly extraverted I have difficulty in the spotlight.
At the end of the meeting, Hollis Baker, 81 years of age, closed with a poignant story from his childhood about the importance of Armistice Day, what we now celebrate as Veteran’s Day. He told of his beloved math teacher who went off to fight and die in the Battle of the Bulge. When this man was sent home to be buried, the entire town turned out for his funeral. He told how after all the town preachers gave their eulogies, the local ne’er-do-well, a veteran of the First World War threaded his way through the crowd and up to the lectern and took a yellowed piece of paper out of his bib overalls. Then, although this man was not scheduled to speak, he recited “In Flanders Fields“, a poem of remembrance from the last Great War. As Hollis spun his yarn, he recited the poem from memory. It was a classic, profound Hollis moment.
We could stand to learn a few things from our elders. Namely that as individuals we have a place in this world, if for no other reason than to accept the torch of our fathers and grandfathers (or mothers and grandmothers) to light the way for those who follow.