Driving While Old

I had an uncle who, well into his 80s, loved to drive so fast, taking the curves of country roads at 40-50 mph, that my father, his younger brother, had to tell him to slow down. But I think most of us, as we get older, become slower and more cautious drivers.

Not only do our aging brains process information slower, there’s more to process. I live in a college town, where I encounter not just cars and buses, but bicyclists, skateboarders and wandering pedestrians—college students studying their cell phones or homeless men stumbling into the street without looking. Because Boulder has pledged to be bicycle and pedestrian friendly, the city has installed cross-walks all over town, forcing drivers to be extra vigilant in watching to see if a pedestrian is about to step into traffic—or worse, someone in a wheelchair, which is even harder to see.

The situation can be confusing when you’re young, but when you’re older it takes more concentration to figure out the whirl of traffic: a pedestrian crossing the street, a bicycle coming up behind you, a car suddenly turning right, lights flashing at a pedestrian walkway.

On top of that, as the world has sped up, the pace of traffic has picked up. My theory is that people have gotten accustomed to the speed of the Internet, to everything happening fast and on demand, and that carries over into their driving. Many drivers, especially younger ones who grew up with the Internet, are impatient and don’t want to be slowed down by an old lady in front of them.

Continue reading →

November 15, 2020 5

Dropping Out

I’m not quite there but I’m getting to the point where I can see the pleasures of dropping out—not like in the 1970s, when young people wanted to flee a materialistic society and live simply off the land. That life sounds more appealing now than the virtual one I scramble to keep up with. Long ago (in the time line of the Internet and social media) I got on Facebook, but I sometimes wonder if I should be on Twitter or Instagram in order to keep up with things. Am I missing out by not being more fully engaged with social media?

How much of my precious time do I want to spend in an online world that is moving so fast I can hardly keep up?

It’s that “keeping up with things” that I struggle with. As I get older, I want my life to get simpler, while social media complicates it and challenges me with new terminology (meme, troll) and new platforms that I struggle to make sense of. I’m so out of touch with the electronic world that when I first read a long article in the New Yorker several years ago about a new program—I mean, platform—called Twitter, I was skeptical and scornful. Why would anyone want to write in a format where you were limited to 140 characters? Well, our president for one, along with millions of others.

Continue reading →

November 6, 2020 4

Talkin’ About My Generation

It’s only recently dawned on me that my generation—not just Baby Boomer but the older half of that generation—had it easy (unless you were a minority, which is a different story). My lifeline followed the prosperity of this country—starting from the 1950s when an economic and population boom followed the end of World War II. Housing was cheap, and my parents’ generation was flocking to the suburbs, where new subdivisions were being quickly built on what was farmland. I recall that my parents paid $15,000 in 1956 for the house where they raised our family. (Of course, everything was cheaper then; when I was in college, I remember working at office jobs where I was paid $2/hour.)

For my generation, college was affordable (I recall paying around $2,000 a semester), and jobs were plentiful after graduation. I didn’t have to worry about student debt, because my parents, even with seven children, were able to pay the tuition.

My father was a firm believer in the stock market, and his investments grew throughout the decades, with only a few blips here and there. He also saw the benefit of buying property—a few acres here and a few acres there when he had the money—which also accrued value as the decades passed.

Continue reading →

October 24, 2020 2