Expressions from the Past

    We used to visit relatives on occasion,when we were kids. All the visits had to be on weekends, usually Sundays, as I recall.  My father worked every day, and I don't think he ever took a day off.  He did have one week of vacation time, which after a number of years built up to two weeks, so maybe some of the longer visits took place then, like to his relatives in Glens Falls and Schenectady.
    Every two weeks or so, we did drive to my mother's old homestead to visit Nanny, Helen, and Matt and to her sister's house in Melrose,  where we kids felt more comfortable. And much less frequently to my father's brother's family in Hoosick Falls.  There were kids there.
      But on the extended visits to the other relatives, we kids usually sat quietly on the couch while the adults talked.  Back then, we kids may have been greeted when we walked in, but were otherwise ignored.  We just sat in silence.  Most of the people on those visits seemed to be of a generation older than my parents, or at least my mother who always seemed young to me.
     Not that I had much interest in the conversation of these adult strangers, but there was no option but to hear what they were talking about.  I remember there were two  expressions that bothered me at the time.  I suppose they triggered a kind of depression in me, though I would have had  no idea what that meant.  I only knew I found it unsettling when the adults spoke the words.  I was thinking about this the other night and it came to me that no one says these words anymore.
      One of the terms arose when someone  would announce, in response to an  affliction or potential health crisis affecting an elderly relative, "She's beginning to fail."  It was delivered in such a resigned fashion that I would wonder why anyone would admit or accept that state of health.  Well, they don't anymore.  Just ask Medicare.
     The other expression occurred when one of the women (always the women, the men were in the kitchen or out back, speaking their own language), would  say, in reference to something bad happening to someone young, how tragic it was.  "If it happened to me, I could understand, "the woman would say, "Because I've  had my life."  I just couldn't comprehend how living people could talk as if their lives were already over.   I don't think anybody ever says that anymore either.