I think I appreciate a lot more as I get older, including qualities in older people which I previously thought vices. Mostly because I am afraid of the trait in myself, I am hesitant to embrace my grandfather’s affinity for social interaction. He is great at getting people loosened up and comfortable, talking about anything and everything in an effort to both humor and understand the people he talks to. He will laugh about at something generally funny one minute, make a crude or sexual remark the next and then go off on some unrelated tangent that somehow comes back to a flaw in the government. He is very much like a carsalesman in that way I think, but I don’t mean it in a bad way. Just like Edward Bloom in Big Fish, some people are just social people. I think Leslie has been that way for a long time and for that reason has raised a daughter who has become my mother and raised a son like me. Lately, and tonight when I saw him, I have tried to be much less judgemental and more appreciative and open to experiencing what he brings to the environment around him. There are many things I love about my grandfather, and things which I do not wish to cultivate in my own life, but like Benjamin Franklin said about his wife, “I sing of my plain country Joan, some faults have we all, and so has my Joan but then they’re exceedingly small and now I’m grown used to them so like my own, I scarcely can see them at all.”
