Respect Your Elders....and the half-dozen or so stories they choose to tell over and over.

Do you know anyone old?  Say, 65 and up.

Do you ever talk to them at length about nothing in particular?

Try it.  You will hear great anecdotes from their life pre-65+.  Anecdotes that will give you insight into who they were before they were this aged person sitting before you, and let you get to know the person better. Stories that, if this 65+ chatter is a family member, may clear up some questions about other family members or old family jokes or which band of gypsies were the ones to drop you off on your "parent's" doorstep when you were a wee tot.  These grand stories will be intricately woven webs of vivid detail.  Or, more likely, there will be cadillac sized gaps in details such as names and dates and points of stories.  But where details fail, you will surely find fervent conviction!  And plenty of brilliant hindsight accompanied by sage advice for your own future.

Ah.  

It's a real treat to sit and hear these recollections.  And it's great to be able to appreciate the difference between the years in which you were raised, and those a senior citizen's childhood called home.

After you'd had this opportunity to look through this glimmering window into the past, wait a while and try it again with the same person.  I am positive you will find that at least three stories you heard in the first conversation will wind their way into your second conversation.  Don't worry if you missed any details the first time around.  They will be slightly different this second time.  Or they might not be there at all.  Or, joy of joys, they will be exactly the same as the first time, verbatim, chock full of the same detail voids, conviction, and advice.  

But hearing the stories again will only help you remember them better.  So it's ok.  You really won't mind hearing them again.

Until the third conversation.  And the third time you hear the same stories.  With the third set of details.  (Or course, by this point, if you piece all the versions together, you may actually get the whole story, so that's a bonus.)

But I completely understand why someone who may be past their prime would want to endlessly recount tales of their own rich history.  In these stories, they were young and vibrant and had their wholes lives ahead of them.  They had loves worth loving and fights worth fighting.  Back then they looked forward to days ahead which didn't include a multitude of doctor's visits or rounds of medication.  These fondly remembered days were free of the humility of being cared for by those to whom they were once a bedrock.

So the next time you talk to them, and they tell the same stories, again, just smile and pretend you've never heard them before.  

Because you just may never get to hear them again.