Hello my gleaming friend. I appreciate you passing through the ancient canopy above to bath me in your light. These old bones, those that haven’t ossified, do appreciate the warmth. It’s been long since I had a visitor, so even one so quiet as yourself is welcome. It seems that the outside world no longer has need of one who remembers the ages past and now the solitude that I desperately sought during the techno-plague of 2042 will now become my prison at the edge of eternity.

This vale shelters my tree and I but beyond its borders the world moves on. Still, I had hoped that it would take more than an invasion of flesh eating lizard-men and their irresistible succubus droids for the world to forget me. After all, it’s not like this is the first time that the promise of supernatural robot sex lured all the animal life on this continent into feeding pens.  Just because you’ve been tricked into a life of forced gluttony doesn’t mean you can’t pick up a phone.  And if you think being eaten by a gaggle of needle toothed hatchlings is an excuse for not visiting… Ah, sunbeam, the young ever forget the old.

It was the same in my day. In fact, you might say that forgetting the old was perfected in my time. You see, in ancient times dealing with elderly was simple. You milked them for their wisdom and then as soon as opportunity arose you stranded them on a passing ice flow. It was a practice that was beloved by all, especially polar bears. Then two things changed which brought the custom to an end. The first was global warming. Suddenly there weren’t enough ice-flows or polar bears to go around. The second was a dramatic improvement in medical technology. People were now living decades past their usefulness. It was a diabolical binary. Old people were denied both the quiet dignity of being eaten by a savage artic predator and the sudden release of catastrophic organ failure. Instead they were doomed to a living purgatory in a world that had no use for them.

It was a sad thing to see. A granite jawed patriarch who forged a life from nothing forced to take up golf. A woman who raised five children on her own left utterly bewildered by e-mail. Understandably the children of these people didn’t want a walking reminder of their own impending mortality doddering around the house in a bathrobe. So what to do? In the early days families would just keep a good supply of bourbon and cigarettes in the house and hope for the best. Some of the more proactive would challenge the old ones to “friendly” Indian wrestling matches or an invigorating jump attempt at Snake River canyon. But these techniques were anything but perfect.

In the end it was the free market that once again rescued society. Some enterprising soul created the retirement community. To the untrained eye the retirement community resemble nothing so much as a condominium with a cafeteria and a small hospital attached. A simple concept and I suppose the simplicity was part of its genius. It simultaneously relieved young people of their elders and segregated old people from a world that no longer made any sense.

The practice finally came to an end with the coming of the electronic rapture, a virtual eternity as a digital being was far superior to a few decades of powdered eggs and petulant grand children. Still I can’t help but feel that the loss of natural order may have cost us something. Who else but one who has lived through the allotted three score and ten can see that even through all social change that the same rules apply. That people can be counted on to behave with the same corruption and nobility that they always have, regardless of the superficialities. At the very least that visible reminder of mortality may have been what we needed to hold off extra-dimensional carnivores.