I started noticing more and more recently how many people, mostly people around my age, don't respect their elders as much as they should. I guess I've always been the guy who walks behind the slower old folks without complaint. I'm one of the few kids who enjoy talking to them, too. And not because I have to, hehe. Especially my grandpa on my mother's side. He's got emphysema and he's been smoking since he was six. He's around 70 now, and I haven't got much time left with him, but I enjoyed his war stories. He was in the Navy when he was 17, he faked his age to make money for his family. Come to think of it, his life would make a pretty nice movie... Anyway, he served on a battleship, got to see a bit of action, told me all about war. It's pretty ugly stuff, but it's interesting to hear about and not just read it from an old magazine article or something. He told me about how they launched depth charges, watching the fish die & float to the surface, his hearing impaired from those monstrous cannons and such. He was even there when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, although the crew had to be hunkered down in their quarters for most of it. Or, at least, that's what he told me. Haven't had much reason to doubt him so far.
More recently, I had been playing ping pong with the seniors on a few Thursday nights at my grandparents' retirement community thing, a couple years ago when I still lived in Florida. Aside from playing a few good games (and they were surprisingly skilled), we talked about life in general, and the thing I admired the most was that they talked to me like an equal instead of like a boy, like most adults do.
Last night I was at a restaurant with my uncle, mom, my uncle's friend, his wife & their five-year-old daughter, who shared an anecdote about never going to a certain other place to eat. "But we just went there three weeks ago," her dad said. "Yeah, but that was a long time ago." I laughed for awhile at this. Our sense of time seems to grow with age, but it's understandable, having lived longer, a period of time which once seemed like an eternity at a younger age now feels like a flash when you get older (Or so I suspect, from the little I have experienced in my fifteen years of life so far). So, if you haven't, talk to your elders more, if you can. You'd be surprised how nice it is. Heck, even those famous operation stories can be interesting if you pay enough attention. It's funny to think that my generation may very well turn into a generation of old men & women who listen to rap & punk rock, reminiscing about those old Xbox 360s and ancient iPods from years gone by.

z"Hadn't originally intended to write an essay on this"K