As a pedestrian, I find myself wondering about the people I pass on my daily excursions in the city of Trnava. Each morning I pass the same group of laborers in their orange vests, chipping at a shoulder-high brick wall before the entrance to the city. Twice I have seen a pair of darker-complexioned men on bicycles of such dilapidation that I wonder how the wheels manage to turn on their corroded axles. Often a man or woman in fashionable attire leads a little child by the hand on the way to school. My path leads me alongside the windows of this school, where children clamor and scramble around desks under the supervision of wimpled nuns. Every face interests me. Most intriguing to my fancy, however, are the old people.
Old men with graying mustaches, clothed in somber grays and blacks and denims, lurch along on their one-speed bicycles. The women, many of whom have dyed their hair a strident shade of red (a vestige of Communism), dress in similarly subdued raiment—ankle-length skirts and bulging coats that abruptly branch out into two tiny feet toddling beneath the unbalanced load. There is a certain generation space whose female occupants favor furry gray hats.
Mentally, I parallel their experience with that of elderly Americans. While our Seniors have witnessed their share of woes—World Wars, Depressions, Vietnams, and Cold Wars among them—such sorrows appear almost trivial to the sort of hardships sustained by these hearty perambulators, who dwelled under the blight of Communism for so long, and whose parents and parents’ parents for generations lived under the thumb of various regimes. Ours were the woes of the independent, shaking off the threat of oppression (real or imagined) and natural disaster. Theirs were the woes of the browbeaten, seeking to carve out a life from an imposed mold that as often as not sought to crush them, and leaving their children to reap the benefits.
And yet they walk, while our brave and free seniors settle indoors in little ranches and condos, lose their mobility, and move to nursing homes. What does this mean?
I don’t claim to know. I merely posit the hope that, whether my future lot contain adversity or anesthetizing prosperity, I will walk when I am old.
Old men with graying mustaches, clothed in somber grays and blacks and denims, lurch along on their one-speed bicycles. The women, many of whom have dyed their hair a strident shade of red (a vestige of Communism), dress in similarly subdued raiment—ankle-length skirts and bulging coats that abruptly branch out into two tiny feet toddling beneath the unbalanced load. There is a certain generation space whose female occupants favor furry gray hats.
Mentally, I parallel their experience with that of elderly Americans. While our Seniors have witnessed their share of woes—World Wars, Depressions, Vietnams, and Cold Wars among them—such sorrows appear almost trivial to the sort of hardships sustained by these hearty perambulators, who dwelled under the blight of Communism for so long, and whose parents and parents’ parents for generations lived under the thumb of various regimes. Ours were the woes of the independent, shaking off the threat of oppression (real or imagined) and natural disaster. Theirs were the woes of the browbeaten, seeking to carve out a life from an imposed mold that as often as not sought to crush them, and leaving their children to reap the benefits.
And yet they walk, while our brave and free seniors settle indoors in little ranches and condos, lose their mobility, and move to nursing homes. What does this mean?
I don’t claim to know. I merely posit the hope that, whether my future lot contain adversity or anesthetizing prosperity, I will walk when I am old.
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