Rant #2,885: Old Days

So what did I do on my first official day as an "old fogey?"
 
I pretty much did what I said I was going to do, or at least wanted to do.
 
I did all the errands I had to do, I did some work, and yes, I even got a chance to watch a few innings of the Yankees’ game with the Orioles, which happily, they won, in honor of my big day, of course.
 
I replied to a lot of people who wished me “Happy Birthday,” a lot of people I have known since I was a little kid as well as people I have gotten to know through Facebook.
 
I received well wishes from not only friends, but family, too … I was happy to hear from my nephew who lives in California, and so many others who live more locally to me.
 
So now I am officially an “old fogey” at age 65, but what exactly is an “old fogey” anyway?
 
I hadn’t thought about that term in years until a day or two ago.
 
When I was growing up in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York in the mid 1960s into the early 1970s, that is the term we young’uns used to characterize the older folk who also lived in the development, many of whom were not very nice to us.
 
Honestly, a lot of them were, in fact, pretty nice to us—I remember my friend, Arnie, whose grandparents lived in the development, and his grandfather in particular, was a really nice guy, wearing a Sailor hat on top of his warm smile—but there was a contingent of older folks who used to say nasty things to us about everything we did, and seemed to be so sour as they sat on the benches outside the buildings near the parks, where we played ball day and night.
 
Looking back, these older folks were all born at the turn of the 20th century, while we were born past the middle of the century, and there definitely was a generation gap between the older folks and us young upstarts.
 
They didn’t understand us, we didn’t understand them … and remember, this was the mid 1960s through the early 1970s, when everything was changing at a rapid pace, and I do mean everything.
 
If you were staid in your ways like many of those older folks were, I guess you didn’t look too kindly on us younger folks and all the changes we were bringing to the fore.
 
So I guess we started to call them “old fogeys” because many of them had no patience with us, probably as much as we had no patience with them.
 
What I did is look up the term “old fogey” and find out what it actually meant, and I came to this entry in The Free Dictionary (https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/old+fogey).
 
What is an old fogey?
 
According to The Free Dictionary, it is defined in a couple of different ways, most leading up the same thing.
 
It is a noun, and can also be spelled “fogy.”
 
Here are the actual definitions listed:
 
“An older person, especially one whose views or attitudes are considered boring or old-fashioned.
 
(Usually disapproving) (usually of an older person) a person with very old-fashioned or traditional views, opinions, etc:
 
An old-fashioned person; an old man.”
 
But younger people can be “fogeys” too:
 
“A young person with old-fashioned views, style of dress, etc. is sometimes called a ‘young fogey.”
 
I didn’t know that.
 
Now, how we latched onto that term is completely unknown to me, but I do know that when they were yelling at us from the benches for doing one thing or another—one woman, with a gray bouffant hairdo, always was yelling at us about something—we would call these older people “old fogeys” to their faces, and they would be aghast at the very utterance of that term.
 
They would say to us, “What would your mother say if she knew you were calling us that?” and as a kid, I just shrugged it off, because these older people were, in fact, “old fogeys” to us with all of their complaining about this or that.
 
And I, personally, was in a situation where I had a measuring stick to use against these people, as my own grandparents were alive during this period, and my grandparents were as far from “old fogeys” as could be.
 
My paternal grandparents were as “old school” as anyone I knew, Orthodox Jews who went by the letter of the religion for everything they did.
 
My maternal grandparents were as modern as anyone I knew, taking in everything that was new and vibrant and “now” better than some people a quarter of their ages.
 
Maybe I say this because they were my grandparents, but both sets seemed to get where my sister and I were coming from, and they were not “old fogeys” at all.
 
The people sitting on the benches in my neighborhood who knocked us for everything we did as kids were certainly “old fogeys,” but were they “old fogeys” to their own grandchildren?
 
Who knows, but now I am an “old fogey” myself, and I just know that some of those oldsters that sat on those benches are now moving over on the benches they are sitting on in heaven and making room for me when my time comes.
 
If I am an “old fogey,” I pledge to you that I will be a nice “old fogey,” and roll with the flow, just like my grandparents did way back when.
 
Have a nice weekend, and I will speak ot you again on Monday.