Boom chicka boom, let's hear it for boomers
BURTON W. COLE, Editor
By Burton W. Cole
The headline grabbed me by the gray hairs. I squinted through my trifocals for a closer look: “Seven classic skills boomers can do without thinking that millennials need YouTube tutorials for.”
I scanned the article by Lachlan Brown, who, from his photo, appears to be much closer to millennial than a baby boomer like me.
I may not be able to post a whatzit on Instasomething or tap out a text with more than a finger poke at a time, but perhaps Mr. Brown is the teeniest bit jealous of what those of us born from 1946 to 1964 can do.
Which is what exactly?
Brown began his list with sewing buttons. “
Ask a boomer how to reattach a shirt but-ton, and they’ll grab a needle and thread before you’ve even finished your sentence.”
Uh-oh. I’m flunking the boomer test before it gets started. I do possess needles and several colors of thread, but I never got the hang of using them — mostly because Mom did it.
These days, kids buy jeans already ripped and shredded. We boomers earned our own tears through hard, knock-about roughhousing outdoors.
Our moms would apply a new layer of patches, and we ran outside for another round of tackle football, jumping off the barn roof or throwing dirt clods at each other, because back in my day (a classic boomer phrase), we didn’t sit indoors in front of screens all day.
We didn’t need a new anything, not when what we had was perfectly usable with a slight adjustment or two. Our dads didn’t believe in paying for anything that we could build, patch, hang, hammer, duct tape, wire or repair on our own.
That leads to another of Brown’s boomer skills — fixing things around the house. Today, homeowners study at least six YouTube video before attempting very carefully to make a repair the proper way.
Back in my day, we learned how to make do. Who cared which type of screw was prop-er for the job when you could just nail a thing and be done with it?
Boomers also know how to read a map and find our own way to places without the use of one single solitary GPS. No, really. We memorized directions, we knew landmarks, we trust-ed our senses of direction.
When I was a college kid, I never took the same route twice for the two-hour drive. I knew that if I kept making random turns south and west, I’d eventually run into campus.
Which is another skill boomers have — the ability to suffer boredom by amusing our-selves without any screens or electronics.
(We did lack the ability to refold road maps once we plotted our routes. Buy a car built in 1964 or earlier and chances are there are still at least three balled-up road maps crammed into the glove box.)
What else, Mr. Brown?
Ah yes, boomers know how to balance a checkbook without using an app. In my day, we didn’t have an app for that, no matter what “that” was.
We can cook a meal without recipes or measuring cups. To this day, I survey the cup-boards, cabinets, fridge and freezer, pull out a half dozen or so things that look like they MIGHT go together, stir it into a saucepan with whatever spices strike my fancy, and voila, I have my specialty dish — Glop.
Once my guests get past what it looks like, I have never heard a bad word about Glop. My guests usually ask for seconds and the recipe. Seconds I can give. But there is no recipe and I have no idea how much of what I stirred into the mix.
The other big skill we boomers don’t need no stinkin’ instructional video to figure out is how to write a formal letter, in cursive with an ink pen, and to do so politely.
We boomers also can spell out entire words and phrases. We do not LOL or TTYL or SMH. IDK why millennials and others do that. IMO, you’re grownups so use your words, people.
See, we boomers aren’t useless. If the internet fails and YouTube falls silent, we are humanity’s hope.
Uh-oh.
Send Burt complete sentences at news@falmouthoutlook.com or on the Burton.W.Cole page on Facebook. TTYL.