America is fast losing writers deserving of being called such, and in a youth-oriented culture I’m often reminded of the cautionary words of the elderly to young people: “We have been young, but you have never been old.” Of course, there was a time when I was young and believed I was smarter than I was. Such is the case with most young people; but invariably it takes growing old to realize you were never as smart as you once thought you were; and the increasing years serve to cause us to have fewer “answers” to many of the questions of youth.

You know the commercial where the caveman takes exception to the psychologist because she condescendingly considers herself smarter than him. I wondered at the time whether they should have used Dr. Phil in that spot. But when someone catches me making an error in writing I most often recall the film “Safe House” with Patrick Stewart. Not because of Alzheimer’s disease, but because of the errors that begin to creep into the writing of the elderly. Those of us that have reached the “golden years” know the “drawer” becomes quite full, and it isn’t at all unusual for age to not only often cast an azure tint over memory, but for homonyms and other such things to give us trouble. Our eyes begin to fail, and our minds don’t always keep track with what we are attempting to do, and peek in our minds may come out peak in our writing; not because we don’t know better, but such are the vicissitudes of the aging process. Alas, so are the many problems that accompany having lived long enough to remember youth, but unable to recapture it.

But those of us who have lived to an advanced age know what Bill Cosby meant when he said our minds begin to reside in our backside, because we often forget what it was we got out of a chair to get, only to recall what it was when we sit back down. And when we bend over to get something off the floor, we find ourselves asking whether there is something else we are supposed to do while we are down there before straightening up again.

As to writing, I personally admire the elderly that write and post to various blogs. That they are able to do so at all causes me to think “God love ‘em.” They are trying to keep their minds active, they have computers and are still learning new skills and often have something of value to share with others. So I’m not quick to jump their case because of typos or errors of either grammar or memory. Wherever possible, if a particularly egregious error should be committed, a polite email to the writer is most often graciously received. Certainly when I have made such an error I am grateful for being corrected.

Among my most treasured possessions are the letters from my maternal grandfather. Grandad couldn’t spell his way through a book of cigarette papers, but in his declining years he had managed to get hold of an old typewriter. Hunting and pecking he would laboriously type out letters to me, and sometimes they would be nearly indecipherable; but they remain treasures.

But there is another matter that has nothing to do with age; it has to do with something I learned many years ago. A person was trying to share his reading of “The Talisman” with someone and the person corrected his pronunciation of the word talisman. However, as it turned out the person doing the correcting of pronunciation had not even read the book. I generally welcome being corrected, most educated people do welcome such correction, but most would rather the person have at least read the book before presuming to correct them.

In the old Saturday Evening Post there was always a short article entitled “The Perfect Squelch.” When I was a boy I read one of these in which a person had given a speech, but it was obvious English was not his native language. When he had finished, someone commented to the fellow, “You seem to have a lot of difficulty with our language;” to which the speaker replied, “Yes, and I have equal difficulty with six other languages as well.”

When I am going over something I have written and an error suddenly leaps out at me I am grateful I was at least able to catch it. Unfortunately, I don’t always catch these. But nothing serves better than to learn a foreign language to teach you your own native tongue. When it comes to grammar and syntax, I was appalled by my ignorance of English while trying to master German, Greek, and Hebrew, and came to understand why as a boy I struggled so with Latin and Polish.

So, to all my companion oldsters who are hunting and pecking on the blogs I say keep at it; stay active and alive in your minds. We have something of value to contribute to a younger generation in hope of their taking heed whether we spell it correctly or memory should fail. And regardless of how full the drawer becomes, as long as you can see and write continue doing so. The Internet and websites are marvelous tools and venues for the young, but they deserve and need the guidance and examples of the elderly capable of making their thoughts known to others.