I've been thinking alot lately of the elders, the ancestors. I have a clear memory as a little boy going to visit my great grandfather. He was the first Salvatore, I'm the fourth. My father, who is the third was taking me to see his grandfather. I remember walking through the streets of East New York and entering an old tenement building. We walked up three flights of very old stairs which led us to his apartment. This is where my father grew up, these streets, these buildings, to me it was foreign, strange but somehow alluring. I had heard the stories of my relatives coming from Sicily and settling in Brooklyn. I had heard the stories of my grandfather and great grandfather and now I was going to meet the one to whom my name was to honor. When I entered the apartment I was filled with awe, in front of me stood this 94 year old man, tall, alert, very strong. He didn't speak a word of english. We proceeded to sit down, and as my father spoke with him in Sicilian and drank wine, we all ate and I was filled with a strange feeling. I felt that I was being let in to some mysterious adult world, a world that I had heard of and so wanted to be a part of. Although we couldn't speak to each other, the love and pride radiating from my great grandfather was palpable. I will always cherish that memory and miss the honor of really getting to know him...................just this past November we celebrated my grandmother's 101st birthday......what a joy, she is alert, healthy, loving and filled with a sense of humor and a devious glint in her eye.....I so cherish the fact that I have gotten to know and appreciate her.....................there is so much wisdom and so much to be learned from being in the presence of our elders that I am often saddened by the way we so often discard them. So many of them are left to despair and waste away in too many old age homes which are kinder to animals than they are to our aged ones. I see so many of our elders tossed aside, their feelings ignored, their insights overlooked, and shuffled off to the side as if their lives no longer deserve respect or have any meaning............so much of our culture is obsessed with youth that we have turned a blind eye to our most valuable resources............in other societies, children would look up to the adults and be guided by their elders into initiation ceremonies where they would then become adult men and women......where have these ceremonies and relationships gone.........our youth is too often blinded by the allure of other youth and is much too quick to dismiss the knowledge and wisdom that stands in front of them.....it is a two sided sword though, because our elders and adults are too often infatuated with the desire to stay young at any cost and what we see is a very sad and disturbing display of aging celebrities who are beginning to look like alien experiments.......I think we all need to begin to heal this rift between the ages.....we need to look at the integrity of everyone's life from first breath to last and begin to realize the wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and unspoken insights both intellectual and spiritual that lays before us........it's almost like we are recklessly tossing away our greatest gifts. Wisdom is accrued by living and failing, and trying and succeeding and by being scarred, but by enduring. This greatest asset is only accrued by living to an older age........I have friends of all ages, some in their twenties and thirties, some in their forties and fifties, and many more in their sixties, seventies , eighties, nineties and I'm glad to say that my oldest living friend, my grandmother is 101!....I often travel out to the Lakota reservation in South Dakota, and it is beautiful to see the honor given to the elders during the Sun Dance ceremonies.....for in their bodies. minds and spirits, they carry the lost knowledge of a great race..........let's all embrace our own elders and ancestors and open our children up to a different way of seeing the world and participating in this glorious journey..................they are truly our greatest asset!
