coarse world

This is the kind of coarse world I see around me.

My father, even if senile, even if a member of the category "frail elderly", is yet a human being deserving of respect and dignity.

He is not a child, and it is wrong to condescend to him if he makes an attempt to please you through humor.

He has suffered disrespect in his life---indeed, at an early age.  He was told, when quite young, that his father was "too poor" to pay for a college education.

And, so naturally, the fact that my father achieved a college education is important to him.  (And, it was an important fact for my life as well.)

So, today, if you speak to him as if he were a child, and do not listen to him, if you do not attempt to grasp in some measure that he has had a long life, and he was once young and full of life as you are today, then you do him wrong.

If your powers of imagining are so limited that you cannot understand that his "stories" are glimpses of a past you do not know, then you do him wrong, and you impoverish yourself as well.

I don't feel that my father is getting the respect he deserves.