Dear Editor,
I watch a lot of British television. Why? Because there are old people in them. People who look like me: men and women with white hair, who speak like I do and who live in the kind of homes I lived in. Homes with lamps and old sofas and chairs and carpets and tables much like the ones I lived in when I was growing up.
Grandma and Grandpa lived only a block or two away, and Grandma dropped in to talk to Mom. If she ever came in the evening after we went to bed, she climbed the stairs and came to kiss us good night. Sometimes she told us a little story about when she was a girl in England.
Why am I telling you this? I am telling you this because I think we have lost the capacity to look at each other; to speak to each other. Relate. It's the funniest thing. You can go to a meeting and you are invisible. I mean invisible. Since I've become very old, people don't see me any more.
I'm still alive. I am still able to speak. I can even laugh out loud. I am human. Why do you think that is? Well, I have some theories about this, but I don't think being invisible allows me to think out loud about them. Sorry, but that's just how it is.
And that is why I watch British television shows about older people; about people like me. I think I am blessed to have lived with old people. I mean really lived with them. Maybe that is why I watch British television.
Esther Darlington
Ashcroft, B.C.
