Fresh Fruits and Well-Aged Cheese

My lovely YayYay savoring a Felix and Norton cookie for the first time

" The oldest trees often bear the sweetest fruit" -German Proverb

Our society values youth enormously and especially teenage years. The teenage dream. Everyone is thriving to adopt a teenager look, the adults and even babies. Kids stopped dressing like kids at times. Every age group has seemed to adopt the same look when being fashionable. I remember during my childhood years having real kids clothes, clothes that would look ridiculous on adults, and the grown ups looked like grown ups. We don't think wrinkles and grey hair are beautiful. We all must look young and act young! Well, I'm not denouncing this new tendance since I do love all those nice fresh looks, but what I am noticing is that we now value everything young, fresh, and new.

I like young, fresh, and new. I love  ripe, classics, vintage, Victorian, historic even more. I was brought up mostly by my dear grandmother, who us, grandkids, call her affectionately YayYay. Without assuming all elders are wise, YayYay is for sure, a wise woman. I was fortunate to be exposed and raised by such a wonderful mature soul. My grandmother is one of the person who counts the most to me. I am thankful that she got to live with us. We seek for her wisdom and our YayYay is the core of our family. She is the excuse to all get together for a family reunion. She is "the egg that binds all the meatloaf relatives..." (...ok, that one was really far fetched...this blog is making me hungry..You? ).  The thought of all those elders in nursing homes without anyone visiting them, or without family at all saddens me. It saddens me that elders are now considered a burden of society when not that long ago, they were valued and their life experiences would be an asset to collectivity knowledge. When they become ill, shouldn't it be our turn to take care of them the same way they took care of us? To me, it is the full cycle of life (with the exception of cases where our beloved grandparents would need constant monitoring and hospital equipment, or intensive care of course...) It saddens me when I see people roll their eyes when a grandparent starts telling stories about their past. I want to hear their stories. I want to learn from them, be inspired and transmit those stories as legacy to the next generations. I think we are becoming presumptuous to think that we don't need them. That the internet can give us all the answers. That our modern lifestyle is the perfect way to envision life.

Toddler me with my dear YayYay

People ask me quite often if I still love Komar like on the first day, after ten years. I still remember the thrills of our beginnings, but those were the novelty thrills. Nothing in comparison to the true love that has binded us throughout all these years. So my answer would be "no" in reality. I do not love him like on the first day, since on that first day, I was more in love with the fact that I had found him. I do not love him like on the first day, because my love for Komar has grown exponentially since. I love him more than ever and will continue growing this love that we have invested so much into. Then I get this reply a lot " You don't get bored once you already passed the stage where you discovered everything about him and that the mystery is now gone? ". I'm not even done discovering myself so how can I think I got him all figured out? :P

I, like everyone else, value youth also. If we could find an elixir against aging or a potion to become eternal, I would be the first in line to buy it. But even immortal beings such as vampires value and respect the elders, the first vampires who had turned...(another weird analogy not fitting this but it just came up and blogs are for impulsive thoughts so there it is)...(now, I'm not too sure what my point was anymore...) . lol

In the end, it's again, all about balance. Right now, I feel like we're tipping too much on the youth side and forget the values of the past, the old, the wise. We must remember both sides and make them harmonious just like fresh fruits and well-aged cheese...