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forty years. Arrived to his friend's place of work just as he was
leaving for ho me, he invited him to a cup of coffee. "I'd love
to," exclaimed the old friend. "Couldn't we make it sometime
later?" His reply imminently succinct , "when we meet in anothe r
forty years down the line." The point being that modern man has
been stripped of his appreciation of the human worth. Socia l
acculturation is one of the first emotional defenses to fritte r
away from the aged mind. Days would pass wherein this old ma n
from the East Coast nary exchanged a single word with another
human being, the result being a noticeable decline in his
conversational skills. M ost of his day was spent listening to mp 3
recordings or lying in bed reading books from the library.
Creative Productivity: Oil paintings, ceramic and cardboard
arts and crafts, a solar cooking oven I produced according to my
own design, collections of hard disks filled with video movies,
hundreds of literary files of that cover of vast expanse s o f
geography, technology, and topography; medical and socia l
science literature; intellectualis m, are part of my life
commitments. The time I spent in these areas o f pursuit, studies
in the area of child develop ment and language skills and more
than anything, my writings have given me a media, the means to
express thoughts that may have value to people with whom I
become involved. The question is what message I want to remain
in my absence, after I'm dead and gone like Papa Hayden. It's
also important to keep old me mories alive for reason that long -
term me mories are a lasting form of entertainment well into old
age, so pays to strengthen them here and there.
We spend our lives in towers of cement structures designed
for human inhabitance, crowded onto lifeless streets : bereft o f
human contact and emotion, soul essence. The most simple wa y
to add meaning to the life of old people is involve the m in
"keeping alive" the value of listening to the ir verba l
expressions, giving the m a feeling of self -importance. A few
months ago, before the death of my mother at the age of ninety,
she had suffered from Alzheimer's, but she was attentive whe n
I told stories of things pertaining to her sister that we heard
around the family table when we were but children, sixty years
earlier.
I have learned fro m my study of Asian culture that whe n
people reach old age they start to produce artworks to leave as
an inheritance, and I do similarly with oil paintings that I create
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