Says I To Myself, or Maybe the Universe

 

When commentators were falling over each other trying to illustrate what a long time Queen Elizabeth II had been queen (xx number of Prime Ministers and Presidents, etc.), they hit home with this statistic: they said that only 10% of the world's current population had been alive when Elizabeth was crowned Queen.

Well, that was June 1953, I was alive and a few weeks shy of my 7th birthday.  I have a vague recollection of the royal procession televised in black and white, but that's likely from seeing it later.  But I could have seen it.  I'd certainly seen Hopalong Cassidy and Captain Video.  (I'd also pondered the mystery of Bishop Sheen's guardian angel erasing his blackboard, just out of sight of the camera on his Tuesday night show.)  

When I heard this 10% statistic (assuming it is accurate), I was knocked back a bit. While I didn't realize my age group is that much of a minority (my generation was pretty large), it's not news that I'm not swimming in the Zeitgeist the way I once did.  Not that I even want to.

Since my retirement I've pursued the second look-- examination of some worlds of my past, but from perspectives made possible by the passage of time.  That's probably not surprising to anyone who has been reading this blog since 2016.  It's quite a lot of what I've been writing about.

Writing about a past of limited interest to that 90%, and doing so on an outmoded medium on the Internet, is not a recipe for a readership of clamoring millions.  Thanks also to Blogger ending support for the email notification system of new posts, my already small officially measured readership has diminished further.  I can't say I'm happy about mostly talking to myself, but I'm not about to change what I'm doing.

  Not everybody gets this chance--to look back, to reexamine, to discover aspects of the past I didn't know or understand, to explore the textures of the past in the present, to go deeper, to connect up those scattered memories into contexts.  Sometimes to experience the shiver of recognition, as when I recently flipped through an old history textbook I'd used in probably eighth grade, as seeing certain illustrations prompted an eerie echo of staring at them in 1958.  It's not all bliss--some memories revived do haunt the nights.  But I'm still not going to miss this opportunity.  I don't apologize to anyone for this, and I expect to keep doing it. 

 Maybe I'll find a better platform to write about it, but so far it hasn't bothered me enough to spend the time looking for one.  I spent way too much time in my life writing fruitless proposals or begging for assignments, trying to please editors and agents.  I know I'm overcompensating, but to me the Internet blog means I write and I publish it, no proposals to be approved, no publication situations or egos to deal with.  No market research.  No submitting manuscripts and waiting.  So nobody looking over my shoulder.  I just write it (hard enough, thank you) and publish it. In terms of access, my potential readership is the entire world, for as long as this thing is connected to the servers.  There's nothing stopping them but themselves.