all of the selves we Have ever been
My phone rang three times this morning before I could get to it. It was a surprise. I am accustomed to receiving text messages throughout the day, but the phone does not ring often any more. As I ran for the phone, I was reminded of my youth. When the phone rang, it generated excitement. Everyone in the household dashed toward the landline wanting to be the one to answer. If the caller was a relative or someone known to everyone in the family, the receiver was passed around until each person had a turn to talk. On the phone or in person, parents trying to civilize a child would never tolerate offspring who did not courteously respond when spoken to. And much of the time, children were expected to hold onto their thoughts and just listen. Now people show up at state capitols with assault weapons. They gather in the streets. Burn down buildings. Take over police headquarters. Bury people with tweets. Is this what it now takes to be heard? How do I ignore thee? Let me count the ways. First, there are in-person encounters. I would say face-to-face except people don’t look at one another any longer. They are busy staring into their phones and scrolling with their fingers, giving an occasional “uh-huh,” as you speak. Folks gather in the lunch room, at a meeting, or around a dinner table with others and occupy themselves with their phones. They might even laugh and talk out loud to no one in particular as they read quips from their screens. Then there is the old-fashioned letter. What a surprise to get paper mail! But how likely is a person to receive a letter anymore? And what is the likelihood someone would answer if you took the time to write? A person has better odds of discovering cave drawings than getting a letter in reply. Email was great at the start. Fast. Efficient. An exciting new technology. Now? Forget about it. People are entombed in email. If you get an answer, it might take weeks. More often, there is no answer. Ever. Recently, someone I know shared frustration that an important colleague had 200 unopened emails! Ouch! And is that just the tip of the cold shoulder? Probably. I called a business associate one day to follow-up on an email. As I waited on the line for him to search his inbox, he told me that he receives approximately 300 emails a day. I would be on life support by the end of a week if I tried to thoughtfully answer that many emails. And don’t think you can sneak up on someone with feigned urgency by calling them. Folks rarely answer their phones unless they want to chew out or humiliate a telesales person. “Let it go to voicemail” is the company song. We all know that voicemail is hopeless. Too much effort. You have to dial your voicemail box, listen, maybe jot down a number or a piece of information, and dial back. A person would need a boost from a bottle of Ensure to support all that effort. And who keeps Ensure on hand? Your best hope might be a text message, but don’t look for deep or thoughtful communication. Short messages might appear curt. Acronyms can lead to confusion. Suddenly, someone stops speaking to you because a typo lead to a new acronym that unintentionally insulted the receiver…The alphabet was once something decipherable by preschoolers, now you need an interpreter. Does that statement deserve an OMG? A WTF? IDK. And I give up. And then there is the interplanetary universe of customer service. Phone menus. Holds. Chats with AI. Scripted responses. Little that is helpful. Much that is infuriating. What is the actual goal of customer service? Drive up the sale of psychotropic medications and mood stabilizers? There is a lot of discontent brewing among the ignored and dismissed. It is a sad day when it is easier to storm the capitol than it is to get a return phone call.
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I have a few screws loose. I know what you are thinking, but I am not talking about my head. I am speaking about my pots and pans--a set of stainless steel Farberware that I received as a gift when I first set up housekeeping more than 40 years ago. With the help of some Bar Keeper’s Friend Cleanser, the collection still sparkles like new. Lately, about every two or three weeks, I tighten the screws that join the handles to the pots and pans, but within a few days, subtle wiggles return. I am having trouble accepting this change in condition. These pots and pans have been with me most of my adult life. Every meal ever served in my home has come from inside these familiar vessels. The dutch oven has also served as a health aid at bedside when a stomach was upset. It has been a dish pan, a step stool for tiny feet, a helmet, and a container for Legos. Each pot has taken its turn as a musical instrument and a sorting bin. All have left the kitchen to come and go from the magical world of make believe. These kitchen tools have conjured up cleaning potions, medicinal tonics and Kool-Aid scented play dough. We are a team my pots and me. We have our systems down. Without a measure, the smallest pot and I can fill a favorite tea cup to the brim without a drop of overflow. I know just how long the searing meat can sizzle in the skillet before the roast begins to stick. The bend in the bottom of the largest pot guides my pour of oil as I prepare to make the crunchiest popcorn. We’ve been together a long time. These containers have outlasted countless apartments and two houses. They are well-traveled, moving in state and out. My pots and pans proved sturdier than a marriage, and more reliable than a Rolex. They helped me to feed and rear two children, sharing my memories of warming baby bottles and pancake breakfasts on sleep-over mornings. As one, we have simmered spaghetti sauce and soup to help fill stomachs in households where sorrow has been. In the digital age, we have grown accustomed to constant updates. We no longer expect our things to last. We buy pre-fab furniture and leave it at the curb when we move. Fancy refrigerators and cars that talk to us last just a couple of years before they break down, require an update, or need a part so expensive that we might as well replace them. I am a child of the mechanical age growing up in a household where a washing machine or a television might need a repair, but it lasted a lifetime. Families accumulated fine things not so much by shopping, but by handing down treasured heirlooms to the next generation. There is no bread machine that can replace the carved wooden bowl in which my grandmother kneaded the dough that became her signature raisin bread. There is no fine cabinetry that can replace the worn butcher block on which my grandfather cut meat in a small grocery store that helped feed a community during the Great Depression. I love things that last--familiar things that share my memories and tell a story. Perhaps I will lose my mind on that day when the screws finally fall from the handles of my old pots and pans. Often at the end of a news day, I find myself with the urge to weep. On those days, the world seems so dark, behavior so deplorable. On one such day, I confided in a friend about my emotions. She reminded me that we have lived through other dark times. I reflected on all of the years of my life. Indeed, we have lived through other dark times. There was the war in Vietnam and battles for civil rights, women’s rights, rights of the disabled. Young people were down on the establishment. A president was impeached for campaign shenanigans. HIV and AIDS, 09/11, Ebola…In the live action drama, the list of things that can go wrong is endless. In the still life of memory, everything turns out okay. It was a better time, we say. We long for the good old days. But the thing that makes the good old days good, is that they are over. Done. Finished. Complete. We know how that story ended. We can identify the villains and lay claim to the heroes. All of the story tellers may not have lived happily ever after, but they did live to tell about it. And with time and telling, they developed perspective. Things turned out okay. The worst that was in us fades from memory, while we glorify that which was best. The best that was in us is what stands the test of time. A revisionist history? Perhaps. The emergence of the coronavirus has us all worried. Right wing, left wing, center, we are all the same in this. The people we normally turn to for answers and for cures are as vulnerable as the rest of us. Uncertainty is the worst of feelings. Do we go left? Go right? Stop or keep marching? We don’t know how this story will end. Some days it feels as though we have been sucked into a science fiction novel where we are being transported to the dark past. We have visions of the plague. Though we don’t really know what that was like, we imagine the middle ages with bodies piled high on the streets. We forget that in other parts of the world, these types of diseases still ravage communities. We thought we lived in a better zip code, a more advanced time where and when these things don’t happen, but we are forced to face the fact that the world is now all one giant neighborhood. Mother Nature still keeps secrets. As I watched the news reporting on the coronavirus last evening, I thought about my mother and her brother, Toni. Both survived polio. My mother went on to re-visit her memories of that experience as she aged and struggled with post-polio syndrome. I try to imagine what a time it was, that period before the polio vaccine--the paralysis, death, disability, the fear that hounded people day and night for years. How the summer months we think of as a time of relaxation became a time of terror for families. Polio was a scourge on every land. Even a president was affected. FDR’s legs were paralyzed. Though he did his best to conceal his use of a wheelchair, it was from a wheel chair that he led us out of the Great Depression and through WWII. In his 1933 inaugural address, FDR was the one who said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That story concluded with the end of the Great Depression. World War II ended as well. A vaccine was found for polio, and in the process people exhibited ingenuity and generosity. The March of Dimes was founded and went on to do many noble deeds in the world. When we look back, were those good old days? What should our individual and collective response be in times like these? Will fear reduce us to our worst selves? Will denial bring forth our most careless selves? Can we choose the selves we will become? History has shown that even through our tears, we are capable of harnessing our fear as fuel. Through calm, thoughtful, and deliberate collective action, extraordinary things can happen. At the end of the news day, when I am inclined to weep, I will try to think, instead, of the good old days. |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
April 2024
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