By Daniel Rigney
My grandparents lived in a parsonage in Milwaukee – a two-story prairie-style home designed, according to family lore, by Frank Lloyd Wright. In the spacious basement was a shuffleboard court. A cultural cliché of the time had it that retired folk, when they were not rocking on the front porch or baking bread or whittling birds, might be about the leisurely business of shoving puck-like objects with shovel-headed broomhandles across basement floors.
Times have changed, and so have our clichés. I’m not sure what retired people in general are supposed to do now – if they can afford to retire at all in these hard times -- but I don’t think they play much shuffleboard any more, if they ever did. I could be wrong, and I mean no offense to those who still enjoy this harmless pastime today. But those who still play shuffleboard now probably do so on a Wii game system in front of a large digital screen.
But we’re not here today to mourn the retirement of old clichés. Every cliché must pass away. We’re here not to bury old cultural stereotypes, but to create new ones to replace them.
Each generation needs and deserves its own fresh ways of thinking about retirement.* What, then, shall we do with ourselves in the 21st century as we pass the torch of toil to younger generations and take our cooldown lap?
Recently I’ve talked to several men and women who are moving toward life’s relay station and aren’t quite sure what they want to do with the rest of their lives. I was one of these people myself before I realized what I want to do with my own victory lap.
Some may want to spend their late-afternoon years fishing for bass, or spoiling grandchildren, or gambling away their life savings in casinos, or playing the stock market (which may amount to the same thing). As for me, I’ve found the perfect way to enjoy life in my late-afternoon years. I’m blogging.
For me, and maybe for others as well – maybe even for you -- blogging is the new shuffleboard.
You may be saying to yourself: What is a blog? (Forgive American youth for snickering at your ignorance. They haven’t realized yet that they too will lag someday. Try to be patient with them.)
“Blog” is short for “web log.” Think of it as a kind of personal journal that you share with mostly anonymous strangers. No, erase that word picture. Technically true but creepy. Think of it as a sun-kissed meadow in which you cavort and play, like the small child you once were and can be again, through a medium of words and images transmitted electronically to others, even unto the far corners of the galaxy.
Free of the responsibilities of child-rearing and the burdens of toil, you can now spin and laugh and jump and play with words. Or not. It’s entirely up to you. You can write about quilting or baseball or politics or photography or philosophy or gardening or a thousand other things. You can share thoughts or feelings about whatever you please – even shuffleboard -- within the limits allowed in your legal system.
You can write hourly or annually or whenever the spirit moves you. You can write under a pseudonym or under your real name. You can promote your writings like a carnival barker or share them with just a few friends. For that matter, you don’t have to share your writings with anybody, although for most there is a significant social dimension to blogging.
This, then, is blogging. As a medium of communication, it’s whatever you want it to be. Even if you don’t yet know how to turn on a computer, with a little help you can be up and blogging pretty quickly, picking up skills along the way as you need them. Believe me, I remember a time not so long ago when I didn’t know how to turn on a computer, or what keys to tap to make words and images appear on the screen.
Trust me, all you need is online access to a computer, a patient teacher, and a blogging “platform” or website where you can go to write and send messages to the outside world. (Popular blogging platforms include Google’s “Blogger” and, for somewhat more experienced computer users, “WordPress.” My own platform, “Open Salon,”seems to attract a lot of people who are or want to be writers, including those who view writing as a serious hobby (as I do).
Blogging, like shuffleboard, doesn’t require much physical exertion, and you don’t have to look your best while you’re doing it. The most amazing thing of all, perhaps, is that there are ways to do all of this for free, especially if you don’t mind having some advertising on your blog page.
In my case, I blog because I have various political and cultural thoughts that very few people want to hear about in real life, but that I can send out through my blog to anyone in the world who cares to know about them. I don’t have many Big Ideas, but I have more than a hundred Little Ideas – indeed, a lifelong accumulation of surplus micro-ideas and spare memes that I’ve been unable or unwilling to express in the past for whatever reasons, such as the desire to avoid conflict with others, or to remain employed.
My wife has been telling me for years, and rightly, that I need a “creative outlet.” I think I’ve found it. I’m calling this my “writing workshop,” and I’m using it as an excuse to uncork most (not all) of the thoughts that I’ve been bottling up all these years, living as an urban liberal (three parts progressive to one part left-populist) in a relatively conservative environment.
Now that I’m semi-retired from a generally-satisfactory career as a college teacher, I’m ready to start a new life. I’m not “reinventing myself,” as the saying goes. I prefer to say that I am “resynthesizing myself,” letting go of personal patterns and relationships that have not been enjoyable or life-giving in the past, while preserving and integrating some of the things I like best about my life. Beyond my family, for instance, I especially enjoy reading periodicals, following politics and culture, enjoying comedy, learning about the blogosphere itself, and a dozen or more other things.
So I’m whittling birds, 21st-century style. Word-birds. Electronically. Someday I may whittle one that takes flight.
Maybe you know someone who’s approaching retirement and looking for something constructive and interesting to do. Maybe that person could use a blog to explore personal interests and enjoyments, and to make new friends. Retirement is not a requirement for admission to the blogosphere, of course. Anyone with online access to a computer can do it.
But for seniors – and especially those who don’t know how to turn on a computer yet – blogging may be the new shuffleboard.
*I explored this theme previously in “Fresh Euphemisms for Retirement.”
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram/2011/04/25/fresh_euphemisms_for_retirement
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram/2011/08/11/is_blogging_the_new_shuffleboard
No comments:
Post a Comment