Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data.
I imagine it is the prerogative of every generation to willfully -- perhaps even gleefully -- ignore the wisdom and advice of its ancestors. My generation certainly did, and I'll wager yours did too. It is the way of things.
But now that I have reached a station in life where I can offer oodles of well-conceived, eminently sensible advice -- and therefore am in the grand position to have young folks ignore me -- I understand what I missed. If youth is wasted on the young, wisdom is wasted on the old.
Growing up in rural Oregon, nearly everyone I knew was involved in some way with logging: truck drivers, choker setters, cat skinners, millwrights, tree fallers. They were my father and my grandfathers and my uncles and our family friends. These were rough men, hardworking and boisterous; some were serious drinkers. I never saw one of my father's good friends without a Lucky Strike in one hand and a can of Schlitz in the other.
Looking back now, all of these men seemed utterly unassuming and completely self-contained; pretension was one vice they'd managed to avoid. They often lived in ramshackle homes that they had built themselves, or in trailer houses, which I did for most of my childhood, and they drove rugged and reliable "beaters" that had more metal in their hubcaps than what's in most cars today.
Few of these men had much formal education, certainly nothing past high school, but they all had something I call "sageness" -- a nearly preternatural ability to sort things out. When it came to things mechanical, they possessed a kind of universal competence.
Nothing fazed them. Snapped fuel line? No biggie. A sheered-off bolt on the Yarder? Quick fix.
Perhaps I'm idealizing a bit, but looking back on it now, there was seemingly no problem they couldn't fix, no breakdown more than a temporary annoyance. These men repaired the brakes on their own cars and shingled the roofs of their own houses.
And they hunted. Fished some, too, but mostly the folks who were around me growing up hunted. Venison was always on the menu and we were tenacious carnivores, but several of my uncles hunted other game as well -- elk, bear, antelope.
My Great Uncle Bud, who fought against the Nazis in Europe but rarely talked about it, made exquisite bear salami. The rifle with which I shot my first deer was a .25-20 caliber lever-action Winchester that was my great grandfather's hunting rifle. While I've not hunted in many years for anything more dangerous than bargains, I'm still a fairly good shot, and that's the one thing I think I still have in common with these men.
This all occurred to me while waiting on line at my local car dealership for an oil change. There I was, a man who can tell you the difference between a Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet (line structure and rhyme scheme) or the name of the 17th-century English poet who wrote a pamphlet in defense of free speech (John Milton) but I couldn't remember the last time I changed the oil in a car. How odd that would seem to my grandfather, considering he wrote the mileage down on the sun visor of his '64 Ford pickup each time he changed the oil (every 3,000 miles on the dot).
Of course, even if I had wanted to I couldn't change the oil in our fairly new BWM -- simply opening the hood requires official approval from Munich. But I also have a '92 Ford pickup, and there's nothing stopping me there. All human beings are flawed, including this one, but I suspect our true curse is our collective unwillingness -- or, perhaps, inability -- to listen to older generations and grasp their wisdom and learn from their errors. The philosopher George Santayana's old saw, although now offered so frequently it threatens to become a threadbare cliché, still bites: Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
No one likes to be lectured to by his elders, but not liking something is hardly a valid reason to flippantly disregard it, particularly when the lecture offers a kind of redemptive connection to the past.
And now that time is no longer on my side, I feel the acute longing for the knowledge, that "sageness," those hard-edged ancestors possessed -- if for no other reason than to pass some of it along. Or at least try, anyway.