Sherry Chandler

My year of being 60

The other day I ran into a long-time acquaintance. I can’t call her an “old acquaintance” because she’s probably twenty years my junior. I’m the old acquaintance here. As I was soon led to understand.

After a few minutes, our talk turned to retirement, as it so often does among employees of the University of Kentucky. I said I wanted to work a few more years because my husband and I have a number of improvements we want to make to the house (I subtly didn’t mention the roof) before we get too old to go up and down the basement stairs to kick the old furnace into life.

My friend gave me a keen look. “How old are you?” she asked.

“I’ll be sixty-one in a couple of weeks,” I said.

“Well,” she said, after thinking about that a few seconds, “at least you’re still active. ”

And so, my year of being sixty draws to an end.

So, too, ends my first year of blogging. I celebrate that with a little sprucing up, as you can see. Some new paint, a little dust knocked out of the carpets.

I’ve learned much in the last year, not the least of which is that the old template was just a little too Byzantine for easy maintainence. It was fun, though, and I thank Armando Feler for the use of his photographic portrait. It was taken at The Jazz Factory in winter of 2004/2005.

The photo here was taken at the Guild Fair in Berea on a typically rainy day in October 1998. My thanks to James Burgett for advice about how to spruce it up and make it presentable.

Time to do a little retrospective, but I’ve never been all that good at paying attention to web stats and stuff. Much depends on how the counts are made, which reinforces my distrust of numbers. Someplace between 40 and 50 people come visit me every day. As blogs go, that’s very obscure. But it’s pretty good for a poet. And I think – I flatter myself – that number is probably a low count of my readership, because I suspect that a lot of folk don’t come every single day. After all, I’m not giving you breaking news here.

One of the most surprising things I’ve learned is that, though the posts appear to recede down the page and disappear, they do not, in fact, ever really go away and from time to time I’ll get a response to something I put on the blog weeks ago and have already forgotten about. So with Marian Bijlenga’s Written Weed and the DeZurik Sisters. Folk drop by those posts every now and then. And if I were a smart music publisher, I might think of re-releasing the DeZuriks.

Poppysmatus and I have made about 600 posts in 17 categories. Poppysmatus loves Catullus. I can’t stay away from politics.

I heard somewhere that if you stay at this a year, you’ll keep it up. Looks like I’m in. I have always liked to write letters. Born out of time that way. So this is my letter to the world. Hope you continue to enjoy reading it.

Possibly related posts:

Happy New Year

A year of crockpotting and other stuff

Georgia Wallace

Introducing Poppysmatus

Fickle February

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