When I was growing up my grandmother was the pianist at a little Methodist Church in Bluefield, West Virginina. Every summer when my brother and I would visit her we would inevitably come when they were having something called Vacation Bible School. At VBS, in the Methodist Church anyway, we would go in the morning, sing some worshipful songs, pray, and depending on the age group either color, put together at skit for the grand VBS finale, or do crafts classes.
I loved my grandmother, tried to understand all about Jesus and his twelve friends, but absolutely loathed crafts class. Because I've never been good with my hands (except to type) getting the glue, paper, scissors, and glitter to all come together to make something that was recognizable or usable for that matter, was always a source of frustration. I once dropped glue on the zipper on my shorts and barely escaped an embarrassing VBS wet pants moment when I couldn't get them unzipped in time.
One of our big projects was to build this popsicle stick Ark (miniature) just like the one Noah had gotten all the animals to come two by two to escape the flood. Each year mine always looked like one of those Cuban refugee things where too many people have crowded on too small of a space for too long a period of time. Even though I tried my best deep down inside I suspected any personally aware animal would rather drown than risk a certain and horrible death on my Ark. It was with a great sigh of relief that I graduated at VBS over time to working on the end of VBS finale skit rather than the boats.
As I toured a care center the other day I saw a group of residents working on their own old folks version of my VBS crafts class. They were in wheel chairs or propped up, some even sitting on their own. I couldn't tell what some of them were working in but it was apparent they were having fun. Like older versions of me at VBS many years ago they were trying to find the right combinations of scissors, glue, and glitter to create something beautiful and pass the time in a meaningful way. A casual calculation from a glance around the room told me it was about the same ratio of success to failure as an old person than it was as a really young person. Some things looked like Arks and some things looked like what the animals left in the Arks.
My point in all this is that I think crafts have a limited future for the Boomers as we age. First of all, we're not going to be institutionalized in care centers. There simply aren't enough of them and even if there were, we aren't going. Second, we're probably going to be using the Internet to create photo montages with Flickr or RitzPix, our own Grandpa's Channel on YouTube and our own social networking site on FaceBook. We'll build buildings and create younger versions of ourselves on Second Life and watch the lava flows in Hawaii on holograms in our living room. We'll attract new friends with our own commercials using SpotRunner, and we'll read and comment on each other's blogs filed with our own stories and successes.
