Here is the latest from Jim Vanore at Good Writers Block:
I can’t—and won’t —speak for anyone else, but when we were kids hanging on a street corner, we always viewed ourselves as “being busy”—that is, we had to be doing what we were then doing, which of course, was “nothing.”
Anyone who has ever seen the 1956 Academy Award-winning movie, Martywould know exactly what I’m talking about. The theme of that film revolved around a group of single young men who, night after night, did little more than hang around a bar and talk about what they were going to do. Which usually turned out to be—hanging around!
I will have to admit, as teenagers, we would spend our summer days playing ball, then at night, we’d all gather on the corner and do essentially the same thing we had done the night before…and the night before that. And what we did was—nothing! It’s what young people tend to do with their time. Time means less to them than it does to someone in middle age, and a lot less to them than it means to a senior citizen.
That’s why it annoys me—yes, I do get annoyed—whenever I see a TV show that depicts youth as perpetually busy, while senior citizens are continually shown as dozing, sitting on a park bench, dozing, ambling along with a walker or cane, dozing, gossiping unashamedly, dozing, and drinking the omnipresent cup of tea.