Time Goes By

After seven or eight years of research, my apartment was filled with dozens of books, thousands of articles, binders, boxes and notebooks of stuff. I had learned a lot and was looking for a way to organize all that information.

Blogging was a brand new idea then, in 2003 or so, but it seemed the perfect platform for my purpose.

In those days, the media didn't pay much attention to ageing or to old people (that changed when the oldest boomers turned 65 in 2006) so I didn't expect to have any readers to speak of, and that wasn't the point in the beginning.

So I was shocked a few months later when I saw that several hundred people had subscribed. And they were leaving comments too. Without much effort on my part, the number of regular readers continued to grow, as it still does, until there are now thousands who read TGB via the blog page, the email newsletter, Facebook and Twitter.

I'm still astonished – and pleased - that so many want to read about what it's like to grow old.

What else happened is that while I wasn't looking, I had become an elder advocate encouraging, supporting and promoting a group of people that many in our culture ignore and dismiss based only on the number of years they have lived.

A further surprise is that I'm still at it. I spent a working lifetime as a generalist and loved it. One day I was reporting on cancer, the next on a movie star, a rock group, politics, fashion, etc. I had a wide range of knowledge most of which was only an inch deep, and I liked it that way.

Nothing in my background would make you (or me!) think I would stick with something for 24 years but that's how long it's been when you count the initial research period while I was still employed together with the 16 years Time Goes By has been publishing.