All Of The Selves We Have Ever Been
Menu

all of the selves we Have ever been

The World We Imagine

10/22/2024

2 Comments

 
Picture
 
 Such is the magic of Christmas in childhood…
 that a single gift can provide one with endless                       hours of adventure while not even requiring
one to leave  one’s house.

                 Amor Towles in A Gentleman in Moscow

With so much attention on the November election and its potential aftermath, it is hard to believe that the holiday season is not far away.  I am doing some light research in case the Christmas miracle is that we do have Christmas this year.

What launched my study was a mailing from a large chain store.  I received its holiday gift guide, a slender 35-page catalog that I found in a flimsy roll in my four-inch-wide-apartment-sized mailbox.  My inner child scoffed at the sight.  Talk about shrinkflation! I grew up with the Sears catalog, a compendium of anywhere from 322 to 1,000 pages.  I am going to guess that it weighed about half of whatever I did, and it required two hands and a baby brother to lift it into my lap.

While it felt disrespectful to Sears and to Christmas wishing, in general, to even consider the flyer a Christmas catalog, I took it to my apartment and smoothed it out on my desktop.  I studied the cover. Festive holiday colors formed the backdrop while the featured cover items were some of the classics that have stood the test of time:  Barbie dolls, Transformers, and fisher-price Little People.  The child in me forced my hand, and I turned the pages.

The first page featured gifts “under $10.” There were only nine items in this price category including a Play-Doh Swirln’ Smoothies Toy Blender.  Wow!  I would have sold my sister for that.  Still might. The second page featured items “under $20” and included the classic Lite-Brite.  But beyond page two, there were no prices listed as I found myself at a two-page spread for Lego.  Perhaps the price tags were missing because today’s parents already know they will need to apply for a mortgage and provide the bank with the credentials of the builder.  Curious, I turned to Google for a price check.  Most of the Lego sets were priced at $99.99 or more, some topping $499.00.  When I was growing up, I could have purchased my first car with that amount of dough and it would have come assembled.

Flabbergasted, I moved on to the next pages where my beloved Barbie had been given a two-page spread with similar displays for Disney and fisher-price.  Deeper into the catalog, I smiled at the pages of familiar board games many of which still line my closet shelves. The classics still in my possession are also still in the game of games:  Clue, Life, Monopoly, Operation, Sorry, Trouble, and the ancient Battleship.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Nerf had an entire page devoted to its guns.  They have gotten much larger and more varied.  Nerf now makes a machine-gun named the X-shot Insanity Motorized Rage Fire Blaster.  Just keeping up with the times…Rage and insanity, the name says it all.

After that bit of discouragement, I rejoiced to find that the arts have not gone out of style.  There were pages of craft kits with more Play-Doh items, Crayola products, and the ancient Spirograph.  Even a few books were featured on page 27.  I was all the way to page 29 of the 35 pages before holiday tech made an appearance:  lots of dull-looking headphones, controllers, and keyboards. 

All-in-all this slim catalog didn’t stink, but it sure did shrink.  It made me wonder what has happened to the magnitude of our wishes and the enormity of our gratitude. When I was a child we wished hard and expected little.  We hoped something special would arrive by sleigh.  We marked just about everything in the book in hopes of getting one item that we prized.  Our minds got a workout just by looking and imagining.

I closed the catalog filled with mixed emotions:  the old joy I felt as a child along with the sadness of wondering what has happened to childhood and imagination in the age of technology and AI. I saw into a future in which the human mind becomes as flabby and diabetic as our bodies did in the age of conveniences. I don’t think I ever realized how much our young minds grew just from imagining what we could do, what we would do.  And then, after the present arrived, what we did do: all of those hours of Barbie dramas, Erector sets, coloring books, Play-Doh, improvisation, playing games, learning rules, taking turns, it all amounted to something.  Now, at this stage of my life, the thing I prize most is my mind, the one that grew from all of that wishing, imagining and playing.

But then came the October surprise.  About a week after receiving the catalog, a coworker reported that her nine-year-old daughter watched an old-time detective show on television.  The child was fascinated by the lack of technology and the way the investigators used their minds to solve the case.  “I want to do that!” she said in awe.

Awe and ah! A Christmas miracle in October! I plan to give her the Christmas catalog and show her how it’s done.

 


2 Comments

Belief and Imagination

4/20/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture


When I was in third grade

we had a special program at school one day. 
It was about telephones.  Not all students had phones in their homes.  This class intended to introduce children to the rotary telephone.  We practiced placing calls, answering calls, and basic telephone etiquette.  In addition to the proper words to say in greeting, we had to have some lessons on polite use of a party line.  Back then not everyone had a private telephone line.  Some had shared service.  A person might pick up the phone to dial and find that there were other folks already talking on the line.  Of course, the courteous thing to do was hang up.  There were other more interesting options such as joining in the conversation or silently gathering intel on fellow citizens, hence the special lesson.  No mother wanted some eight-year-old smarty-pants eavesdropping and dishing dirt on the neighbors.

This telephone education curriculum was put together by Bell Telephone, THE telephone company.  Each student was provided with a thin booklet explaining the history of the telephone and discussing potential advances.  The information in the booklet described a future in which callers would be able to see each other while talking on the phone.  A sketch was provided of a large desktop phone with a small square screen.  That seemed far-fetched, like having a television in your phone!  Even a few years later, we found it silly when the bumbling spy, Agent Maxwell Smart, made calls from his wrist…the old wrist phone trick…on the show Get Smart.  It was unimaginable that a wrist phone would be in our future or that one day we would carry a palm-sized phone in our pockets that would do computing, face time, GPS, games, and movie streaming. 

There have been other unimaginable events that have actually occurred in my lifetime.

I remember overhearing the conversations of adults after Dr. Christian Barnard completed the first heart transplant in South Africa in 1967.  Unimaginable! And was it ethical?  Would this really be allowed to go on?  People feared that they would be struck over the head and dragged off to some dark alley where black market organ traders would rip out the hearts of the unsuspecting and leave them for dead.   No one could have imagined a time such as now when 3500 hearts would be transplanted in a single year or that other organs would be harvested to save lives.  And all of this is done in hospitals with sterile surgical technique.  Many of us know or live with someone who has had an organ transplant.  People are casually asked at the BMV about their desire to donate.  No black market, just long lines.  And no longer inconceivable or scandalous.

In 1969 I watched on a black and white television screen as the first man walked on the moon.   Eleven others have done it since then in living color.  As I write this, private entrepreneurs are preparing for tourist travel in space.  Our children will go to school with other children whose parents and grandparents have walked on the moon, and in the future, our kids may travel in space on spring break.  People are already signing up.  No longer unbelievable. 

What once we could only imagine has now become ordinary.  We’ve grown accustomed to our technology and the speed of change.  We don’t imagine, we expect new and futuristic products to roll off the line with frequency.

We seem to have the ability to create and prepare for the things we can imagine.  (Although I am still waiting for the Maxwell Smart shoe phone.  Sorry about that, Chief.)

Now faced with a virus that has the power to take us back in time to the Middle Ages, it is mind-boggling to realize that our best remedy is as simple, as difficult, and as low-tech as staying home.  It seems like a Stone Age intervention leaving some people incredulous, angry, impatient, and unbelieving. Perhaps, in the long process from rotary phones to iphones, from automobiles to aerospace travel, we have become smug and lost our regard for the past and what it has to teach us.  We failed to plan and to prepare—to imagine and to believe.
  

0 Comments

    Author

    Lilli-ann Buffin
    ​

      Get Notified of New Posts 
      Enter your email address and click on "Subscribe"

    Subscribe

    Archives

    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020

    Categories

    All
    Acne
    Adulting
    Advertising
    Aging
    Arms
    Barbie
    Baths
    Beauty
    Beloved Community
    BINGO
    Birds
    Books
    Branding
    Bravery
    Cars
    Catching Up
    Children
    Church
    Cliches
    Clothing
    Comfy Couches
    Coping With Stress
    Coronavirus
    Death & Dying
    Diets
    Dignity
    Discernment
    Drive Ins
    Drive-ins
    Driving
    Essential Workers
    Exercise
    Faith
    Falling
    Family
    Father's Day
    Food
    Friendship
    Fruit
    Games
    Good Intentions
    Goodness
    Good Old Days
    Grace
    Graduation
    Grandparents
    Gratitude
    Hair
    Handwriting
    Health
    Heroes
    History
    Holidays
    Hope
    Houses
    Humor
    Illness
    Imagination
    Influencers
    Ironing
    John Lewis
    Knowledge
    Laughter
    Laundry
    Leadership
    Libraries
    Listening
    Lists
    MacGyver
    Madge
    Magazines
    Mail
    Masks
    Memorial Day
    Memories
    Mental Illness
    Miracles
    Moral Lessons
    Mothers
    Music
    Names
    Nancy Drew
    Nature
    Neighbors
    Oreos
    Other-Mothers
    Our Stuff
    Outdoors
    Parenting
    Pets
    Phones
    Poignancy
    Politics
    Prayer
    Purses
    Reading
    Recipes
    Reinvention
    Revelations
    Rewards
    Rotisserie Chicken
    Saturdays
    Saving The World
    Schools
    Shelf Life
    Showers
    Siblings
    Small Things
    Sorrow
    Speed
    Sports
    Stores
    Substance Abuse
    Success
    Sunshine
    Technology
    Thanksgiving
    Toilet Paper
    Tools
    Truth
    Uncles
    Veterans
    Voting
    Walking
    War
    Water
    Weather
    Wilderness
    Wishing
    Women
    Wonder
    Words
    Work

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
    • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Other Works
  • What Readers Say
  • Home
    • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Other Works
  • What Readers Say