Over the past few months, I got the chance to hang out with my grandfathers on both sides. I asked questions about their past, and I marveled as they talked about the way things used to be. If any of your grandparents are still living, spend more time with them. If you’ve never done this with your grandfathers, I encourage you to, they have a lot of wisdom to offer, and they do appreciate your company.

With that being said, I had a few takeaways from both the conversations I had that I thought needed to be shared.

My grandpa Pace and I went hunting over the Christmas break in D’hanis, Texas. In between morning and evening hunts we’d have plenty of time to talk. He’d ask me questions, and I’d ask him questions. There was a story I remember him telling me about the time he decided to quit smoking cigarettes.

Of course, that was a big addiction back in the 50s, but he knew it was bad for him and knew it was time to quit.

He had read an article that the best time to start quitting an addiction is when you know you’re not going to be stressed for an extended period of time, so when he got some vacation days from work, he told my grandmother he was done with smoking.

While on vacation, my grandfather had a great dinner.

I believe he said it was the best shrimp he had ever had. Upon leaving the dinner, he got in the car with my grandmother, and he reached into his pocket for a cigarette, pulled it out and was about to light it when my grandmother smacked him in the face, knocking the cigarette to the ground. She reminded him that he said he was going to quit, and she was clearly disappointed to see him back out on his word.

This made my grandfather take the rest of the pack and throw them away and never smoke another cigarette again.

This story really intrigued me. It’s simple story but fascinating all at once; it really says something about my grandfather. He was a man of his word, and he respected his wife. It was manly what he did. He did the selfless thing; he didn’t coward back into the addiction, he listened to his wife, he stayed true to his convictions and he gave it up, even when life got stressful, he never let the cigarette control him again. Later that evening, my grandpa went and shot a buck. Perfect shot, I love that guy.

A couple weeks later after that trip, I was riding in the truck with my dad and we were talking about politics like a father and his son will do. He was telling me that as a kid, his dad, my Grandpa Pace, told him that he experienced freedom in a way that my dad would never get to experience. And with that being said, my dad then told me that he himself had experienced freedom in a way that I will never get to experience. My dad then told me that one day when I have children of my own, that I will be able to tell my children that I experienced freedom differently than they do. America is still home of the free, but it’s not like it used to be. Each generation loses things that previous generations had.

I knew what my dad saying, but I didn’t know exactly what he meant. It was until a few weeks later when I was getting dinner with my Grandpa Boyum that I finally got it.

My grandpa was telling me some of the differences between his generation and mine. He said something to the extent of “kids these days just don’t get it, they’re soft, and they have it too easy, they’ve had everything handed to them.” I know what some of y’all reading this, are thinking… Cliché. The old man telling the young man how good we have it, but as I listened to him talk about the way things used to be, I realized he wasn’t telling me how good we have it; he was telling me he felt sorry for my generation. He grew up in a blue collared family. His parents didn’t make much, but they had enough to live off of.

They didn’t give my grandpa a whole lot.

My grandpa constantly reiterated that his parents were good people; they just didn’t have a whole lot of money to give out. Every September, his parents bought him three news pairs of jeans and three new shirts, which would last him up to the summer where then they would cut the sleeves off the pants and shirts. He told me, it wasn’t like they were unusually poor, they were the norm. Since money was tight, my grandpa got his first job while he was still in elementary school by mowing lawns for $5 a lawn. I’m sure he used that money to get his first fishing pole because he then went on to tell me stories about how him and his buddies would wake up at four in the morning on a Saturday and put their stuff all together in a wagon and go fishing all day. He said nobody would ask them where they were all day, they were just free. Of course, there were more examples of they freedom they experienced in the stories he told me, but that one really stuck out to me.

There were a lot of differences between my generation and their generation that became evident to me as I talked with my grandfather’s, it became very clear that many of us today have access to a lot of stuff. It seems like everyday is Christmas with all the new gadgets and ideas that sprout up everyday. But life today sure doesn’t feel like Christmas. We aren’t happier people today, and we definitely have lost some freedom. Don’t get me wrong, I believe a lot of the changes that have been made in our society are good for the most part but I believe it’s important that the men in my generation try to reclaim some of the masculinity of our predecessors. Lets try to preserve some of traditions they had. When you get the chance, hang out with some old timers. Like I said, they’ll appreciate your company, and you might learn a thing or two.