Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

My father was a distinctly midcentury man.

He was a man of tract homes and manual transmissions, cigarettes and pipe tobacco, straw hats and huaraches, sand dunes and surf fishing, Frank Sinatra and Mel Tormé, pancakes with his kids on Saturday morning and roasted meats with his dad at the table on Sunday nights.  He was a dry martini/red wine with ice kind of guy: uncomplicated, elemental, rustic, reserved.

And yet, in his final decade, I found him nearly indecipherable.

Dad’s life was bookended by the Great Depression and the Great Recession, and between those two events, he saw his world change dramatically. The grandson of a charcoal-burner, a high school dropout, a veteran of the Pacific theater, he married his high school sweetheart and rose to the vice-presidency of a lithography firm in San Francisco.

During that time, he witnessed the birth of the atomic bomb, drove on America’s first interstate highways, fought for civil rights, cheered as a man stepped onto the lunar surface, and felt the tectonic shift as his industry (and the world) entered the age of computers.

At which point, something in him changed.

My father never touched a home computer. The utility of tablet computers totally escaped his ken. Video-on-demand and streaming services were alien concepts. He resisted getting a mobile phone as long as he could, and when he finally acceded to their dominion, it was with the proviso that he would only use the damned thing in an emergency (if then).

After Mom passed, this created difficulties for us, his kids. He had no email, no cell phone, and eventually, even the cordless phone for his land-line became a challenge, leaving us with only snail-mail and face-to-face avenues for communication.

What confused me about this behavior is that it wasn’t a function of dementia. Dad still did his crossword puzzles every day (in pen), still had all his mental faculties, always knew where he was and who we were. No, this was a conscious rejection of All Things Technological. He couldn’t fathom how they worked, and really did not want to know.

Why? Why reject these things out of hand? To me, it was a mystery.

Until last week, when I got a glimpse of what he might have been feeling.

The epiphany came when I was learning about the new (to me) data structures of XML and JSON. I found myself growing bored, frustrated, and even a tad angry at having to learn yet again some new technological thingamabob. I’ve forgotten more computer languages than most of my colleagues have ever learned. It’s not that I dislike learning—far from it—it’s that I dislike learning about things that don’t interest me, and now, with retirement on the horizon, programming computers and developing code have definitely slipped off the list of things that fire up my interests. I mean, I did it, I learned about XML and JSON because I need them for my current project, but I didn’t enjoy it.

It did not spark joy.

And I realized: this may be what affected my dad. The world is constantly changing, and the rate of that change constantly accelerates. Trying to keep up with that, trying to climb that ever steepening hill, it can be exhausting, overwhelming, daunting, depressing.

The world has changed as much in my life as it did in my father’s, perhaps more, and it’s going to continue to change, faster and faster. But whereas Dad saw this and rejected it, preferring instead a retreat to his midcentury roots, I am excited to see what the world will invent next. I may surround myself with low-tech items and avocations, but I appreciate the things high-tech can provide. And while I have no true interest in JSON or bitcoin or Tik-Tok or K-POP, I do want to be aware of what they are and how they are affecting global culture.

I plan to spend most of my retirement writing with pen and paper, working with wood, pulling weeds with my hands, and reading books with physical pages, but I also want to see what happens with hypersonic flight, electric vehicles, genetic engineering, and social and civil justice (among other things).

In short, I think it is important for me to stay engaged, even if I cannot keep pace.

Onward.

k