We did it -- the blogaholic AmbivaBro and me. We gave our father his first hit of the white stuff, the beckoning blank screen.
He was not entirely innocent in the matter. I was describing to him the joys of bloggerel, and he got this . . . gleam in his eye. And it dawned on me: of course he was a blogger in the rough! His first ambition when he got back from World War II was to be a journalist. When it didn't turn out to be a great way to support a fast-growing family, he got a "straight job" in mortgage banking, but he continued to write -- letters, occasional poems (in both senses), travel and fishing logs, letters to the editor, and the annual family Christmas letter that David and I decided really was "the ur-Blog." His little brother, whom he lost in the war, had been an obsessive journal-keeper like my little brother and me. This disease is genetic.
The name he chose for his bog: Ancient Mariner. (Blog, I mean. I wrote this last night when my eyes were falling shut with travel fatigue.)
How many Greatest Generation bloggers are there, I wonder? How many within spitting distance of 90? How many who, at 85 or so, managed a fantasy baseball team to a spot in the national top 8? (Since he lives on the beach, all his teams are called the NoSox.) How many who were there when Babe Ruth called his home run in Wrigley Field? That golden age of baseball is the subject of his first post. They are a generation who have so much to say, and who say so little; who've been showing up for over six decades, never blowing their own horns. Will my dad blog about his wartime experiences in the South Pacific, some of them funny? About what it's like to be in your 80s, still together, and watch your friends fall apart? About how vehemently against the war in Iraq he's been from day 1? (But just as vehemently for the troops: he quietly makes donations for the wounded.)
Enjoy the graceful humility and whimsy of his writing. Oh -- and don't trust him on April 1.
- amba
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