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SALT LAKE CITY — They say the older you get, the faster time moves.
“It’s pretty foreign to us,” said Bruce Parsons, speaking on his observations of the present day. “We can’t comprehend. Kids are so attached to that phone thing in their hand.”
For him, a retirement home can be a bit of a refuge from the pace of the present — where everything is in its place, and the passage of time slows down…just a bit.
“It’s an entirely different world in which we live,” he said.
Parson is 96 years old, and you’ll often find him strolling the halls of Cottonwood Creek, a senior living center near Murray. The thing is, Parsons doesn’t live here — he just swings by to visit a friend.
“I enjoy having him come by and talk,” said Sylvia Albertson. She’s also 96, though she admits that since she was born in June and Parsons was born on Christmas Day, she’s “a little bit older than him.”
Unlike Parsons, she calls this place home. The two have known each other for the past 90 years.
“First grade,” Parsons said, thinking back on when the two met. “Madison Elementary, in South Salt Lake City.”
There’s photographic evidence of those years — Parsons is front and center in a class photo, wearing overalls, and Albertson is in the back.
“We went all through school together,” she said.
They shared classrooms straight up to high school — that’s the class of 1940. Albertson still has her yearbook, filled with signatures nearly eight decades old.
And no, they never dated. Parsons says the reason why is because he was “too short.”
“She was about a foot taller than me,” he laughed. “I did find a short girl later on, though. Quite a few years.”
After graduation, they each went their own way. Both married and raised families — Albertson worked for a time at Sears Roebuck in Salt Lake, and Parsons says it took him a while to grow up.
“In height, or in mental capacity,” he said.
He eventually became an optometrist, founding Murray Vision Center, where he worked for 50 years.
Through the decades, they stayed acquainted at class reunions, even as their numbers dwindled.
“All your friends are dead,” Parsons said.
“Well it’s hard,” said Albertson. “It’s hard when you lose all your friends.”
About five years ago, Parsons learned Albertson had moved into a home not that far away from his house. He still drives, and says her place isn’t far off his “line of travel.”
Both have family in the area, and Parsons is still with his wife (“She’s only 92,” he says), but he and Albertson agree that having an old friend is something they cherish.
“So I had a friend,” he laughed, thinking back on his first visit. “A live one!”
“It’s done a lot for me, because I enjoy having him come by,” Albertson said.
Especially when sometimes, younger people just don’t understand.
“They don’t understand like we did,” said Albertson.
“We can talk about the old times,” Parsons said. “Can’t talk about the old times with anyone else. They weren’t there.”
He’s a regular visitor around here, walking Albertson down the hall to lunch, and for conversations about those things they just don’t get.
“They don’t want to talk to each other,” Parsons said, mimicking holding out a cell phone. “They want to do this to each other!”
So maybe he wasn’t tall enough to date — but as fast as time can move on the outside, sometimes it’s nice to take a moment, slow down, and just remember.
“We speak the same language. When you’re 96, you know, going on 97, friendship is everything,” said Parsons.
