I am amazed how often I hear this expression….
Here in Seattle several members of our beloved Seahawks
football team use this phrase to describe the motivating factor in their game
after being overlooked in the player draft.
Their chip shouts “I will show all you pundits who didn’t recognize the great
a player I would become.” I suspect
Richard Sherman or Doug Baldwin would be King of the Chips.
So what’s my chip? I
suspect it is being small. My parents
tried to soften the blow by saying I was “short of stature”. Grandma used to say, “big things come in
small packages”. I discovered for myself
that being small also got me into “tight spaces” and to the top of
pyramids. I also found success in
wrestling because of the lower weight categories and golf where size didn’t
seem to matter. But I confess that to
this day a large part of my drive is fueled by a small chip.
So where does this expression come from? In the 15th century a “chip on the
shoulder” was the ancient right of shipwrights to take home a daily allowance
of offcuts of timber.” I suppose it was
the equivalent to a seamstress of the “remnant” of material or fabric in
clothes-making. Apparently, the chip practice
was often abused and eventually stopped.
Maybe that’s part of the reason why the phrase has taken on a negative
connotation as the “act of holding a grudge or grievance that readily provokes
disputation”. I guess Richard Sherman
has some historical warrant for being a defensive back. Maybe that explains how my chip lead to a
few playground fights with bigger bullies.
My current chip is prompted by the query, “So are you
retired?” Seems like an innocent enough
question, but it feels somewhat accusatory.
Here’s what I wrote in a magazine article recently,
“Are you retired?” That question was
coming with annoying frequency. Did I look so old? Was it an
invitation to a club I wasn’t ready to join? Was I simply in denial?
If this were a multiple-choice question for my college students, I
suppose the correct answer was d.) all the above.
But perhaps I chafed at this query because I
taught in the unit on aging in my human development course, that “retirement”
was a social construct of the post WWII years which “scrap-heaped” (my words)
older Americans in an attempt to make jobs available for G.I.’s returning from
the war.
I knew from personal experience that my
farmer grandfather never “retired”. He kept working productively into his
80s and extended his “coffee breaks” accordingly. The words of the poet,
Robert Frost, capture my sentiment.
But
I have promises to keep,
And miles
to go before I sleep
And miles
to go before I sleep.
Wow, maybe the chip was a board…
While at a conference recently I ran into a really old
person who knew my dad. She used another
expression/phrase which gives me hope as I live the 3rd Act of my
life. She said, “You certainly are a
‘chip off the old block’.” That felt like a wonderful compliment because my dad
was an exceptionally caring, generous and happy person.
To be even a small chip off that block would make him and
little, old me very happy!
