We recently added some Bill Cosby albums to our iPod collection. In one, he says mothers are better than fathers because mothers cry. Give a mom an old stick with a nick in it as a handmade gift to her and she will burst into emotional tears over your loving action. Give a dad the same thing and he will growl "That's just an old stick. Get that thing out of here."
As a dad, that seems accurate to me. We older males have learned over the years to be contrarian and resistant. No matter what it is, we are against it. We dislike everything and are proud of that. We say "No" with gusto and regularity. We realize that life is a struggle and then you die. We don't need no sugar coating. We have learned the hard facts of life and don't appreciate white-washing them.
Somewhere in Loren Eisley's "The Immense Journey", his book on evolution, he says that all the primate males tend to get grumpy and snarly in old age. I read that grizzlies and male cats like to kill young of their own species. Doing so can cause the female to go into heat.
So, don't be surprised if you don't get much positive attention from your old male relatives. Of course, they can't hear as well as you might think and they have trouble seeing. But most things don't sound like fun to them and it is in keeping with elder-masculinity to object or ignore. Don't take it personally. They usually don't mean it that way.
