We think of growing up as something that happens in stages. The conventional stages of the human life cycle include infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. While in reality there are no strict boundaries between them, we celebrate the crossing of their imaginary borders in rituals like baby showers, christenings, bar mitzvahs, commencements, weddings, and retirement banquets. Within the stages marked by those borders, we become responsible for different parts of our culture- and our scripts and our audiences are modified as we grow.

If we think of folklife as a kind of embroidering on the chores of being- chores that are universal and inescapable, such as eating, raising children, seeking shelter, and moving about, we might examine the ways in which members of each stage of life approach the same set of chores differently. Consider a motor skill such as walking. Children never walk. They skip, run, dance, or diddle sideways to get where they are going. They master locomotion by playing with it. While old people cannot play with locomotion in that way, the task of walking about can be spruced up with an imaginatively wrought walking stick- something that may endure and become a reminder of the person who used it.