06/22/23
6/22/2023I’m old school. In pretty much everything.
It’s not just my age. Most of the guys in my morning coffee group are in their 70s or older, like me. But most of them are more with it than I am, especially in technology. In that regard I’m probably the hoariest of our group.
I’m not a Luddite. That designation derives from the skilled textile workers of early 19th Century England who destroyed cost-saving industrial equipment in clandestine raids on cotton and woolen mills that they thought was making their jobs obsolete.
Today the term generally refers to someone opposed to automation, computerization, or new technologies in general.
I’m not opposed to them. They’re just pretty much irrelevant to me. I’m comfortably satisfied to let them go their way in peace and to go my own. I can coexist with them all, no matter how innovative or complex.
Examples? Boy, can I give you examples.
My cell phone is a flip phone. I can send and receive calls and texts, store contact numbers, adjust the volume, and take photos. I keep my schedule in my black-bound desk calendar; Kathy keeps both mine and hers on her smart phone, so if we’re together away from home I can check with her about upcoming events.
At coffee in the morning everyone in our group except me has a smart phone, so if we get into an argument about some fact (and we usually do), one of them can check his phone for the truth.
I certainly don’t begrudge anyone’s having a smart phone. But for the past few decades I haven’t had a driving need for one, and I get along without it just fine.
In the 1990s I was still writing my stories at the Bee and Herald on a Royal standard manual cloth-ribbon typewriter. Everyone else had gone to early Macintoshes. I went away for a few days to a conference, and when I came back the staff had shanghaied my typewriter and replaced it on my credenza with a Mac.
They announced: If you’re going to work here, you’re going to use a computer. On it they had taped written instructions. Number One: turn it on. (I had to ask how.)
Music? Definitely a plodder.
My favorites are oldtime blues, ‘50s and ‘60s rock’n’roll, traditional jazz, and classical music prior to about 1950. From time to time I play piano with a few guitarists, all of us retired journalists, and our general stricture, at least when I’m participating, is “nothing after 1975.”
My siblings and I once tried to decipher when Dad’s popular music comfort level ended. After considerable grilling, we narrowed him down to about 1939: Glenn Miller was OK, but Benny Goodman was pretty avant-garde. Dad was born in 1913, so he hit the wall in terms of his music preferences about age 26.
I was born in 1941, so I made it to about age 30 or so. It’s startling to discover that similarity.
I appreciate and admire the talent of more modern composers and performers, but their stuff is not where I live.
Movies? Casablanca, To Kill a Mockingbird (both of them in black and white), Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Young Frankenstein (another black and white), Animal House, and The Jerk. All pre-1980.
Prose? Shakespeare, Tolkien, early and middle 20th Century American literature, and a few current novelists like Louise Penny.
Poetry? Beowulf, Chaucer, Robert Frost, ee cummings, and Dylan Thomas. Almost of them old school, and certainly now among the dead poets.
Politicians? Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Bob Ray, and Tom Harkin.
Canoes, not power boats.
My walk-behind lawnmower, not a rider.
My eyeglasses style dates from 1961.
I’m writing this on Father’s Day. I appreciate the fact that my kids indulge my penchant for the old. They’re bemused, but seem OK with it, or at least not overly concerned. I love them for that.
I’m not a curmudgeon, at least not of the “Get off my lawn!” variety. I just like the old ways, and I’m not likely to change after 82 years.
My mind periodically returns to the final sentence of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” ♦
