CELEBRATING SENIORHOOD

Weekly Scribblings #46, and we're asked to engage in a

celebratory mood.  I choose to celebrate seniorhood and 

all we've had to learn through the years.

Submitted to Poets & Storytellers United, November 19, 2020

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                                                   CELEBRATING SENIORHOOD

I’ve always wanted to be “hip”.  It’s been a challenge.  Just when I’d think I had the “hip” lingo mastered, a new generation would throw me into a terminological tailspin.  When my children were home they helped a lot, but once they were grown I was on my own, facing the computer era all alone.  Kicking and screaming, I was dragged into the technological era, and I learned about floppies, hard drives, modems, bauds, glitches, megabytes, gigabytes, RAM, ROM, CD-ROM, URL CPU, “tweaking and massaging”.  I could speak it!  I was “way cool”.  I even learned to program my VCR.

I moved into the era of bright, young business majors steeped in “educated verbiage”. Memos became communication vehicles, rate increases became revenue enhancement and a meeting with the boss became encounter-specific decision making.  New locations became geographic kickers, top salesmen became major rainmakers, summing things up became bringing the aggregate.  If it was simple, it was a no-brainer, if readily available we could cherry-pick it, and a push-over was a slam dunk.  Disagreements became cognitive dissonance and the art of persuasion and giving the results became quantifying the impact.  I think became my sense is, getting to the point was cutting to the chase, estimating was ball parking and something likely became a conditional probability.  At home over my bookshelves hung the Thoreau quote “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify”, and oh how I longed to implement it.

On the other hand, I’ve had to learn reverse lingo to understand my grandchildren.  For instance, bad is good, hot is cool, and far out is in.  You’ll notice my list here is smaller, as I’m not understanding much.  It’s no wonder we seniors are more forgetful than the youngsters.  All they have to remember is their own patter. Our brains, on the other hand, are cluttered with all the preceding outdated terms like by golly, gee whiz and darn, spooning, necking and making out, tanked, soused and plastered, fast, loose and easy, getting hitched and tying the knot, inka dinka do, 23 skidoo, hubba hubba and …. well you get the idea!  It's time to celebrate us!