The Old Coot Counts to ten in the pool. Published 1/21/26 in Owego NY

 The Old Coot counts to ten.

By Merlin Lessler

My friend Wesley came laughing into our coffee klatch the other morning. He had been in a store where his purchases came to $10.06. He gave the teenage clerk a twenty dollar bill, a nickel and a penny. A puzzled look crossed her face. She froze, as though in a catatonic state. After a few seconds, she snapped out of it, fumbled in the cash register drawer and handed him a five dollar bill, four ones, three quarters, a dime, a nickel and four pennies, and left the six cents Wesley had originally handed her on the counter.

I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise. Kids grow up today with a series of electronic devices doing a lot of thinking for them. My generation is “Device Stupid.” We struggle to use them. We call their generation, “Common Sense Stupid.” It’s important for us to mix with each other. We can both learn to be less stupid.

When I swim laps in the YMCA pool, I count lengths by reciting, “One two, buckle my shoe, three four shut the door,” on and on with the counting rhyme. When I finish with, “Nine ten, the big fat hen,” I switch from the crawl stroke to the back stroke. I do this over and over for about thirty-minutes.

I wondered if kids today still learn to count using the “One two - buckle my shoe” method. I asked around and apparently they do, even though the rhyme is out of date. Its origin goes back to the 1780’s, when shoes were fastened with a buckle. The industrial revolution in the mid 1800’s replaced the buckle method with metal eyelets and shoe laces. I grew up with laces, but it was much harder to learn to tie, than it was to learn to count. My son grew up with Velcro. Kind of like the old buckle. Now, you don’t have to tie at all. Slip-on shoes and Velcro have entirely changed the shoe landscape.

Terms like, dial a phone, turn a screw counterclockwise to tighten, tick-tock goes a clock and a slew of others commonly used by my crowd are as out of date as buckle shoes, but we still use them, and chuckle when a youngster has no idea what we’re talking about. We probably need to do more teaching and less chuckling, but gosh the chuckling is so much fun.   

Comments? Send to mlessler7@gmail.com