New Ways for Older Folks

This morning’s AP story on Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol and the father of her unborn child, Levi Johnston makes me think. Well, it makes me think some more.

Hubby and I have been stretching our thinking for some time now, attempting to keep up with the “new ways” of the younger generation. Additionally, in the past few weeks, of course, we have the added brain strain of the current financial meltdown.

When we were young (seems like a cajillion years ago) the learning was that the Industrial Revolution had produced the most changes in the past 100 years that had ever happened.

[Lest you think I have gone a little too far in vocabulary today, I Googled it: cajillion. A number greater than any other number and close in magnitude to gazillion and bazillion.]

That was then, this is now. Even when I was a kid, I noticed that older people tended to dwell on the past and wished they would get with the current time.

Well, Hubby and I spend volumes of our time just trying to keep pace with current time and I think we do a pretty good job of it. And, of course, we spend considerable time taking care of our finances ourselves.

You probably have already figured it out that we pray extensively together every morning for our family, our friends, the nation and the world.

What we don’t do is spend enough time de-cluttering and cleaning and polishing away the dust around the house. We cannot go back to the Patty Days! You will have to read my book to learn more about our beloved Patty who became a member of our family. Patty was cleaning houses when we first knew her. She went to college and for several years now, she has been a Registered Nurse. She is a great story of how someone can improve their life. (Of course, now that she doesn’t clean our house, it is not as clean!)

As we older folks do, I digress! It is the dream of every parent and grandparent that their offspring will be happy, healthy and successful. The mistake we make is that we would very much like them to be happy and successful using the methods and milestones we used.

What Hubby and I have had to learn is that we must let the grandkids live their lives on their own terms, at their own speed and a la mode of today’s world. Once we grasped that concept, events started to fall into place and we began to enjoy the great-grandchildren and the milestones in our offspring’s lives.

Probably one thing that bothers people about Sarah Palin is that she and her family are really pretty typical of today. We must go on with our lives as we believe they should be lived and let the offspring do their own thing. They will do it anyway, so we may as well enjoy them as we see them and love them always.

Simpler times are not coming back anytime soon and it is folly to waste our golden years wishing them back.