The world is going to hell in a handbasket. This attitudinal shift remains a nearly unavoidable aspect of aging. We age and cast off following things for their own sakes. For example, fashion? Oh sure, we keep an eye on it, rotating neckties or jewelry to our favorite “it-will-come-back-into-fashion” location, but we pick and choose. Skinny, tailored suits? On this old beer-bellied bod? I think not. Hip-hugging jeans, says my wife? “I never wore them when they were in fashion decades ago!” And don’t get her started about wearing clothes which look more like lingerie than outer garments.
Everything’s going to hell. For us oldsters, new technologies get picked up as they’re convenient, and when they serve a purpose, not because they’re trendy. Consider: smart phones debuted (debatably) in 2006. I waited six years, until 2012, to get one. Even then I got it mostly because I needed a better communication tool when I started consulting. I might have picked up one eventually. I’m sure I would have been forced/enticed into it sometime before 2020…maybe. After all, I’m a techie; I like all the toys. About forty years ago I could hardly wait to upgrade my first desktop computer or for it to conk out and justify buying a new one. Now? I’m leisurely approaching the time when I’ll dig into my Windows 10 machine and tweak its registry settings to permit upgrading to Windows 11. Another old man thing: texting has proven to be a boon but it doesn’t replace email. And why trade clean, open texting for the closed gardens of WhatsApp, the-app-formerly-known-as-Twitter, or Instagram? I resisted Facebook for years, but joined ten years ago. I grew uneasy with a technology that demands everyone ‘talk’ all the time. Doesn’t someone have to listen? And how can everyone something important to say? The horrible year of 2020 pushed me to delete the account. Who wants to be sanctioned for being reasonable? (I understand getting attacked for being ‘out there’, but for being calm and objective?) My point’s drifting here, old man! It’s this: seven decades in, one learns it isn’t very important to follow every trend…or pretty much any trend.
These thoughts crept into my mind as it wandered from thinking about our church’s chorister program (elementary and junior high students who sing in the cathedral once in a while) to the pre-pubescent boys who sing at New College, Oxford, or in the Vienna Boys choir, until finally it came to rest on my own 5th and 6th grade experience of participating in All-City Chorus in Spokane, WA. This program met once or twice a week after school in the most centrally located public high school, Lewis and Clark. How did I get there? I took the bus. Due to its meandering route the trip lasted about half an hour as it drove the seven miles from my elementary school to LCHS. I can’t remember if I took the bus home, or if my father picked me up, since he worked less than a mile away and would have been leaving work about that time. My brother similarly took private clarinet lessons in an old building downtown. It housed a music store on the street level and housed offices on the second floor, one for his teacher. My brother also took the bus, catching it at the end of the block where we lived, and traveling the same amount of time and distance as I. This wasn’t unusual for 10-year-olds at the time. My mind kept wandering. I wondered how common that is now. I don’t know as a parent if I would rest easy letting my child do the same. I’m certain few if any modern parents would. Kids seem to be scheduled for most of their free time and driven by an adult to these activities. This illustrates my point, the one I wandered to this morning:
Old people experienced a different world. I don’t care which generation you’re considering, it wasn’t necessarily worse in their mind. We–any of us at any point in time–dealt with what we dealt with. Life presented itself, and we were up to date with it. We cling to some of the practices from back then, not because they’re antiquated but because they worked. We cling to the beliefs which those practices engendered. Let me explain, by way of an example, how life occurred and thus, how we think and thought. Consider the situation in which two parents decide to let their boys travel alone on a city bus after school. During the winter we left our respective music activities in the dark—Spokane lies a latitudinal degree further north than Duluth, MN, and almost three degrees further north than Bangor, ME. How could a parent allow this? First, we didn’t have two cars. Though we were comfortably middle class, it wasn’t that unusual for families to have only one car. My parents decided they could share it—Dad took the bus at least two days each week—and the money would be better saved for other things (notably our college education). Dad could have taken the bus on those music days, though, leaving Mom the car to shuttle her children.
But you see, that was just a strange notion back in the 1960’s. Kids gained in freedom when they gained in age and maturity. When we were very young, three to five years old, we were told where our boundaries were in the neighborhood. We respected them (mostly). We got to travel the block and only on our street. I got in severe trouble when I crossed the street at the end of our block and decided with a couple other kids it would be fun to roll rocks down the hillside. (It didn’t occur to me that there were cars on the road a hundred feet below us or what a rock the size of a teapot might do to a car.) When a county sheriff’s deputy delivered us to our parents, we caught a lot of hell. When we were in elementary school we wandered wooded lots, rode bicycles for miles away from our homes, and all we had to do was say, “Mom, I’m headed down to Mitch’s house!” As we neared and then entered junior high it was more like, “so where did you two wind up today?” from my mother. Our parents expected us to entertain ourselves, stay safe, and observe the behavioral rules they laid down. We did pretty good with that first part, fairly good with the second part, and…what they didn’t know didn’t hurt them, right?
Today therefore represents a path to perdition, always, for every old person. I stay optimistic generally (and the further I look into the future), but many things worry me about habits which younger people have acquired. I now can see that 100 years ago cars would worry a 70-year-old born in 1855. “Everybody scootin’ and tootin’ these infernal muh-SHEENS! T’aint nachurl! Next thing ya know, people won’t even live together cuz they can just drive to work!” with the word “drive” carrying all the distaste and disapproval an old man might feel.
Humans measure the world using an internal scale developed through experience. We slow our learning process with each passing year, experience becoming a boon and an obstacle to learning new ways. Fifty years later, we don’t even see the same world as younger people do. This is neither good or bad; it simply explains our attitudinal shift. Maybe you caught a bit of that here, but I fear I’m too caught up in it to accurately relay it to you. Everyone my age is nodding their head while everyone thirty years younger has made some derisive sound en route to dismissing the whole notion out of hand.
So be it. You’ll see.
all the voices in my head 