Earlier this week, before the discussion of older bloggers came up here, I told my son I’d made a resolution about my old age, should I get to have one. I told him that the best thing I could do for him, his sister, or anyone else who might end up with me in later years is to keep up with technology to the point where I stay fluent in the basics. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Despite the fact that most of my immediate circle of family and friends erroneously think of me as a geek, I’ve already fallen behind. The web is still a pretty comfortable place, but the whole Pod thing has left me in the dust. I know nothing of Podcasts, for instance. I better catch up.

Then there’s the television. It’s not just about changing the channel anymore. It’s about keeping track of a couple of hundred channels that keep changing their numbers. Frankly the TV guides were never designed for so many channels. I find it easier to check listings on the web and my husband, who is the main TV watcher, just surfs most of the time. If my husband falls asleep watching a DVD, my method of switching back to the television is just to randomly hit various buttons until I get a channel. And then there’s Tivo. We don’t have it, so I can’t really help not knowing how to use it, but in general, I have some catching up to do. I haven’t had time for much television in recent years, and now using one is something akin to a skill. I’ve got to get up to speed on it.

What I’ve learned from watching my mother is the reason for this resolution. She was always happiest working. After retiring from teaching, which was her second career, she and my father went into the antiques business full time. They’d been doing it on weekends for several years. Sadly, my father died with his boots on after only six months. He was at an auction at the time. It was the way he’d have wanted to go. A year later we opened a used book and record store with her and kept that up for almost a decade. After that she went to work part time in a book store. When it became a physical impossibility to keep that up she volunteered - at the library, the pantry for the sick, the food pantry and the church thrift shop. She participated in and sometimes led various reading groups. Throughout she kept up an active and busy social life. Sounds great, right? Yes, but what I see now is that you’ve got to have some kind of plan for reduced mobility.

We could kind of see it coming. Not the memory problems. We never saw that one coming. But before that, we were starting to worry when she went out alone. There were three separate incidents where she took a fall that landed her in the emergency room. One in particular was really frightening because it was while crossing a busy road and she could easily have been hit by a car. Then there was the fact that her circle of friends was starting to shrink. She was too busy to really notice, but it was inevitable. She didn’t belong to any senior groups, where there would be a steady supply of new members and her old acquaintances were moving to Florida or giving up driving. She did a lot of the driving when she and her friends were out and about. Now there are only two left who still drive.

It was with this in mind that we tried to encourage an interest in a computer and the internet. We helped her buy her first one when she was about Millie Garfield’s age. She learned to do e-mail and to find the news but she never really took to it. To get truly comfortable with technology, you have to explore a little and try to figure things out for yourself sometimes. That, she never did. She used to like to write and did some of it in her first career. As recently as a year ago, I suggested she start a blog but although her mental state wasn’t even close to what it is now, it seemed to be too late. She never really cared for any kind of electronic communication. She never watched television. She hated it, really, and couldn’t exactly remember how to turn it on and off, even when it was simpler than it is now.

Now she’s home more than she wants to be and by winter she’ll be home even more. She has short term memory loss, but she’s not out of it in every sense. She still reads, but even the most avid reader needs a little change. She gets bored, all the more so because she has so few resources that she’s comfortable with here in the house. She can use the telephone, the microwave and the toaster oven. If she’d used the computer and the television enough so that the basics were truly ingrained in her memory back beforer she started to lose the ability to remember new things, she’d be able to use them now. And she’d be happier than she is now. She’d be connected to the world whenver she wanted to be, on her own schedule. She’d be in control of something very important. Even television isn’t so bad when you’ve got hundreds of channels to choose from and a lot of time to fill. And she loved movies. Going out to see them is not really something she can do now. It would be really nice for her if she could take advantage of the movie channels that are available. I’m going to try getting her a DVD player if I can find one that seems extremely simple to operate. That, at least, might be something she could enjoy.

So, my resolution is to be able to use whatever information and communication technology is readily available in most homes at such time as I get to the point of being unable to get out in the world at will. You can’t control everything. You might not be able to help being dependent on others for transportation maybe other things as well, but I resolve to be able to keep myself amused and engaged as long as possible. And I’m kind of looking forward to having more time for blogging, or whatever it is we’ll be doing by then.