My Turn in the Cycle: How did I get here?

 Earlier tonight I felt my mind and heart all scrambled yet in another sense I felt I had moved wisely over the latest batch of confusion. I had the task to get my car inspected. So much juggling and so much need for someone to help me with it all. Seems more and more of my life is dependent on asking for help. I am really appreciating the years I both loved and helped older people.For years I talked about the Hoopers whom I helped in their later years...and what social climbers they were and con artists. Boy, I am sure  in their shoes now. I knew and understood what they did then and why they had to do it. In the end they had almost no friends but me. They just didn't make it in the world they tried so hard to be a part of. Only in their obituaries did they have the credentials that were so important to them. A list of memberships that in life had done nothing for them and they had done nothing for.  

And I think of Clint, the old vaudevillian, living on social security in an SRO in NYC and how he shuffled down the hall to share a can of tomato soup and some crackers with me and Ed, young enough to be thriving but down on our luck.  I loved him so dearly. He had a front room in the hotel  with two big windows overlooking upper Broadway and watched the streets like an angel patron of the displaced. He would signal the street vendors and prostitutes when the police were coming. They would rush up to his room for sanctuary then hit the streets again for another night's hard work in a world of outcasts.

In common, those elders in old age had their own survival strategies  and dealt with pain every day of their lives from the infirmities of age. It was probably the pain I didn't fully appreciate as their young protege. Now I'm there. I look back on them with great respect and admiration for their courage, their ability to try and remain cheerful and vital to the lives of people around them when they probably wanted to withdraw to their beds and pray they would be granted the grace to die in their sleep when it just became unbearable. I think of how patiently they listened to me about all the petty complaints I had about my life and had words of love and sympathy for me instead of putting me in my place compared to their own sufferings.

 I loved my old people, but now I revere them for things I didn't know existed for them. I am one of them now. and I am so grateful for the young people who treat me with deference and respect.