Snow days, eagles, red snapper (warning: the fish is dead), and symptoms I am old in no particular order.

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The big news for us this morning is snow. We almost never see snow at the coast. We went through an entire winter one year without even a frost. On the other hand, about forty years ago we had almost two weeks of freezing temperatures in the 20s. You might know we average over 90″ of rain a year, but snowfall is unusual because with the big old Pacific right outside our door, temperatures drop only when there is no cloud cover. Sunny and cold or cloudy and warmer. Cold and dry or warmer and wet. Usually.

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I will not get my walk and run this morning so it’s a good thing I got in miles yesterday. I will not be meeting a friend for lunch or grocery shopping, but there is Zoom and FaceTime and a well-stocked pantry. I have started sourdough. The internet is working. All is well with the world!

A website lists the many ways older people (“Baby Boomers”) fail to keep up. My husband and I are baby boomers (born 1949 and 1952), and we are prey to a few of the outdated habits listed online at a clickbait site: we still write a few actual paper checks each month, we email, I prefer higher waist jeans (yes, I know). We have liquid soap but I have used the same bar of French milled soap for months in my shower, and toast for breakfast? I have a waffle maker but more often toast is just what we want—”fast forward to the present when waffle makers, blenders, and breakfast burritos exist”?—these things have existed throughout my 70-year-lifetime. Did someone think they were new creations? On the other hand, we scoff at conspiracy theories, have always thought cruises were ridiculous, and we never “dress like a tourist” even when that’s what we are. I think many activities no one does anymore, I never did to begin with. Racquetball, potpourri, and fuzzy toilet seat covers? Yuck. My grandmother had a fuzzy toilet seat cover. Do they even make them anymore? Patterned wallpaper is actually having a moment, though not in my home. No white New Balance shoes here, but I do have a ridiculous pair of flower-patterned Crocs chosen because they are silly that I wear to garden. Sometimes (horrors!) even with cotton socks. I am told “Owning crocs means you’re old, at least deep down.” Well, golly, did you want me to pretend I am young?

Regardless of whether you had to learn it in school, the reality is that no one uses cursive in the outside world, and if they do, they’re going to get some confused looks. People’s handwriting is already bad enough, and making things harder to read is unnecessary. Let’s just write normally.

—”40 Things Baby Boomers Still Think Are Cool”

What, exactly, do the authors consider “normally” means? I hated cursive as a child and prefer to print, and I prefer to hold actual paper books in my hands, but I have older and younger friends who prefer cursive and texting. The real problem is that word symbolize ideas and things, words on the page symbolize those words, and the further you get from me to you, the more distant and tenuous is our connection. I’m not sure some people can read and write much anymore except on a screen. In my last years of teaching I found high school junior and senior students who had no signature, literally had no signature because they were so accustomed to doing things online that they’d never created one. The only way they could sign was by printing their name—why not just write an X? I suppose it’s a sign of my old age that thinking about this distresses me even now.

My son assures me the sort of post I’m quoting is another example of agism and I should ignore it. Maybe. I was less offended than amused. I assumed the goal was to be funny, I only wished it were smarter. I appreciate most of the new stuff—food processors and computers are my friends—but confess I dislike audio-books. (Honest, I tried twice, but no, I can’t do it. Maybe if I were commuting every day and the book was trivial?) I think an entire generation is incapable of reading a map, signing their name with an actual pen, or understanding that paint on paper or canvas is not “art” simply because they are the ones doing it… by hand!

Many manual tasks were already outmoded by the middles of the last century. I came of age at the tail end of the generation that assumed women would be supported by their husbands. My mother went back to work when arthritis shoved my dad into early retirement, and her mother worked when Mom was a child. Many women in my generation or a few years younger so thoroughly rejected the traditional roles allowed to women that they didn’t learn any of them. They still do not cook or clean or sew. In our house, it’s mostly Gary who cleans and repairs. I cook and paint walls. At various times he has been the primary support of the family and at others I was. When I was not working at all, I scrubbed the kitchen floors, cooked and otherwise cleaned. When I went back to work, Gary took over some of those chores. We tried to keep things fair and balanced between us. For example, when he retired a few years before I did, Gary promptly took over managing our bills and checkbook. When I retired, I took half that task back—he writes and mails the checks and I fill in and balance the checkbook. Is that old fashioned or just equitable?

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

―T.S. Eliot

In the mean time, as I type this post, it’s still snowing. My upstairs work area is finally getting a sorting, and next week I need to work on our taxes. [I will submit them online, but I do them first on paper, and I do them myself.] If I were really old-fashioned, wouldn’t Gary be doing the taxes, or handing them over to be done?

Temperatures are still going down but the sow is expected to end at noon. We have 29° just now.