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For our first dinner back home after each French vacation we dine at a small local bistro, hoping to prolong the mood we have just left behind. During one such evening I turned to those at the next table and wistfully reflected on how well the food and ambiance captured the feeling of France. The unexpected response was a long tirade on the evils of the French, their rudeness and their hatred of Americans. Not wanting to create a scene, I merely replied that such had never been our experience in many years of visits throughout France, and then my wife and I turned back to the privacy of our table.
A little later the four at that next table rose to leave. On their way out the older woman who had so vociferously attacked the French turned to us and said that the man across from her was her eighty-year-old husband, adding with manifest pride that the woman by his side was his hundred-year-old mother. We rendered appropriate admiration.
As, departing, they walked by us, that most elderly woman slowed down to let her companions move on. Then, when they had passed, she leaned over and whispered to us, “Don't pay any attention to what they say. The French are wonderful. When I was young I almost married a French man, but I never told them about it.”
There is a polite tradition in our culture, and perhaps in all cultures, of respect for the wisdom of the aged, but that respect often is a thin veneer covering our true feelings that those old people are ones we would rather not bother having to see.