They are slow to reveal themselves to me – those ‘secrets of old age’ my mother used to speak of.  She never actually identified what they were and I assumed they had to do with the inevitable decline in one’s physical abilities that were never discussed in ‘polite society.’  You know.  Those problems that ultimately lead to purchases of shoes and clothing with Velcro fasteners or maybe to exploring the choices for Depends® and other “Adult Incontinence Products, Underwear, Pads & Protection.”  YIKES!

No matter what she was hinting at, I knew that I would never learn precisely what she meant.  She was of the generation (and maybe I am, too) that believed there were only certain subjects that were fit for open discussion.  The biggees to be avoided in public, of course, were sex and politics. One never  broached those subjects, even with friends, no-matter-what.  But there were definitely other topics that weren’t discussed beyond a one-on-one conversation.  Certainly not at the family dinner table.

These days, of course, all bets are off as to what is acceptable conversation — at dinner or otherwise.  No longer is that the measure of what is acceptable to speak of out loud and in public.  And for good reason.  No longer is “family dinner table” a standard.  Period.  I can’t, in fact, wrap my head around the concept that there is at least one entire generation that hasn’t ever experienced “around the dinner table” as a regular part of daily life. One statistic I read said that the average time spent around the dinner table sixty years ago was ninety minutes.  Today, it is twelve!  Not much time for polite conversation or even for conventional manners.

So… I’m thinking that one of those secrets mom referred to is the slow-but-sure change in our entire way of life and those mental adjustments that go with it.  The changes in values and mores are happening faster than we oldsters can accommodate – a fact of life we’d just as soon not deal with.  I’m not sure we could, even if we wanted to.  Too many little subtleties lost.  Too many new attitudes coming from too many directions, I think.

Not a new thing, to be sure, but certainly an escalating one now that technology has entered the picture.  My folks used to marvel that the world their folks had grown up in went from the age of horses to the age of airplanes and that they, themselves, had watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon.  What they didn’t talk about were the day-in-and-day-out mental adjustments and accommodations that they had to make in the name of progress.  Those, undoubtedly, were some of mom’s ‘secrets.’

Or maybe it’s just that they were not a generation of complainers.  Maybe mom’s reference to those secrets was her way of saying “suck it up!”  Back to that old adage of accepting what you cannot change – even if that means those insidious results of ‘progress’ that we begin to experience and lament as we grow old.  The things that younger people don’t want to hear – actually are incapable of hearing until they, too, grow old.