all of the selves we Have ever been
I am here to warn you: if you are having trouble sleeping, do not turn on late-night television. I repeat: DO NOT TURN ON LATE-NIGHT TV. You will be transported to hell and will spend the night circling all nine rings. You will wish you had pulled your left kidney out through your navel with a fork instead of picking up the remote. The heat you generate will not be from tossing and turning. It will be the actual flames of hell. I have the burns to prove it. When we were young, our parents warned us that nothing good happens after dark. I will add an adult corollary: There is nothing good on TV after 12:30 AM. As a matter of fact, the FTC should require an automatic warning beginning at that hour: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. The anguished screams you hear will be your own.” Once you turn on late-night TV you will be tormented by commercials for identity protection services. Don’t bother changing channels. The same ads will be on every station. These infomercials will remind you how right now, at this very moment, bad guys are stealing the deed to your home and trading national secrets with foreign despots using your passport. What else? These monsters may even be stealing your butt prints as you lay on your sheets, prints they will use in some future diabolical scheme to pretend that they are you as they back out of a lead vault with a briefcase full of nuclear codes. And do not stare, because the bad guys may take an iris scan as you watch… By the time these infomercials are through with you, you will have visited all nine rings of hell, and you will be regretting your life. All of it. You will regret not accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior, having pre-marital sex, helping yourself to seconds at Thanksgiving dinner every year, squandering precious allowance money on baseball cards when you were 10, screaming at that scam caller who tried to get your Medicare number, refusing to buy a flower from the Hare Krishnas at the airport in 1965, voting for a questionable politician one too many times, and being a rude host at that professional convention back in 1990 when the hall was packed and the air conditioner broke down. No Minotaur will need to eat your flesh. You will have bitten your nails to the quick. This nighttime experience will add to your daytime hypervigilance. You will be reminded that scammers are stealing your voice by calling you on your phone and waiting for you to say “Hello,” and that your image has been stolen from your g-mail profile picture and now your head is on dozens of indecent photos that are going viral on some dangerous porn site where they are sure to ruin your future except now you don’t have one. The pervasiveness of these identity threats will haunt you and rob you of your faith in humanity and in your higher power. Will there be anything left of your identity to show at the Pearly Gates? You wonder: “What if someone already took my spot?” It’s possible. Let’s face it--Santa has already been scammed by identity thieves. We all know some very naughty people who have gotten some mighty fine presents. Now I understand why. If you unwittingly do turn on late-night television some sleepless night, I strongly suggest that you do not open your email the next morning because you can be sure another ring of fire awaits you due to the internet’s Lucifer having heard of your vulnerability by spying on your smart TV. An automatic subscription renewal notice will be waiting. It could be for some add-on to the identity theft package you purchased in your middle-of-the-night-panic or one of those “free trials” and “one-time purchases” you made because you believed them when they said “free” and did not see the fine print that said what they really meant by “free” was “you will be billed forever.” No matter how desperate you feel the morning after, don’t think you can call the authorities to report this violent mind-rape. It will be deemed your own darn fault for being up in the middle of the night and inviting these strangers into your home by turning on the TV. And weren’t you already in bed? In your pajamas? Well, then, you were just asking for it. And forget a morning-after pill to calm your frazzled nerves. They have disappeared from the shelves because, after all, two wrongs don’t make a right. Unfortunately, you will not be able to leave the country because your passport has been compromised and no country wants stinking American immigrants with guns in every pocket--especially illegal ones without a passport. If your mind is already overwrought and the anguished screams you hear are your own, then late-night TV is not for you. For your own sake, ask someone who loves you: “Please! Hide the remote.”
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During the recent presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris came clean and admitted she owns a gun, a Glock, in particular. Glock advertising promotes a firearm that is safe, reliable, and simple to use. In a spirit of solidarity, I thought I should come clean as well. I, too, have a weapon that is safe, reliable, and simple to use. I am a registered book owner. I prefer a good hardbound tome. Come into my house, and I might throw the book at you. My shelves are loaded, and I keep one in my nightstand drawer and another under the seat of my car. I am dangerously enthusiastic and known to wave a loaded book around in a crowded room. I am a card-carrying member of the NRA, National Readers Association, an informal but large group of people devoted to keeping both a diversity of ideas and the written word alive. Members are not ashamed to have their entire book-borrowing histories subpoenaed and reviewed by the authorities. We firmly believe that anyone who has never read a book should not be licensed to speak sparing us the barrage of words and the assault on our minds. We prefer thinking heads to talking heads. Members of the NRA understand that while it is the job of social media is to infect its users with outrage, the job of a good book is to inject its readers with insight. Unlike the chaos of social media, a good book calls our minds to order. We know that good books have been thoroughly reviewed and thoughtfully edited. In times of crisis, members of the NRA take to opening lines of communication and sharing book titles, beautiful poetry, and stirring essays. Our members know that on the internet, incendiary ideas are not policed—“free speech” its users demand, but some of those same free-speechers seem to want to go after our rights to carry a book. Some posting free-speechers claim social media conspiracy theories don’t harm people, books do. They worry our kids will be harmed by a book tucked away on a library shelf—if those kids ever get off Tik Tok to look for a book that is. Many of our members have seen t-shirts and vanity license plates with more inflammatory ideas than To Kill a Mockingbird. Even as we hear over and over about the declining mental health of our children, some parents and authorities fear children will get “ideas” from books, and so they seek to ban those books. NRA members believe it is naïve to think that children are not getting bad ideas every day from social media, the internet, television, and each other. We believe a teen might be safer in a private space reading a book to sort through an issue in their lives rather than having to live through it. A kid can feel less alone with a book, less self-conscious. A book provides context and perspective. NRA members believe we should be thanking librarians and turning to them to find out what’s on the minds of our children so that we can be better parents, better teachers, better adults, and better political representatives. We live in a time when fiction and truth are dangerously blurred. Too often, important decisions are made based on shared wild imaginings alone. We members of the NRA believe it is an act of bravery to open our minds and open a book before making important decisions. Interested? The NRA welcomes new members. Our motto is: “Let’s exchange ideas instead of gunfire.” There are no membership fees and no background checks. All you have to do is open a book. We are confident that opening a book will open your mind. Be brave! I am taking a break from the pall following the national election to consider something more uplifting. I have begun to notice a proliferation of storefronts, signs, and electronic billboards in my urban neighborhood. It would seem that day spas and cosmetic treatment clinics are more popular now than the fast food chain Wendy’s, and popping up faster than my age spots. When I was young I never really believed that the changes of aging would happen to me, and so I took a definite stand on face lifts—I would never get one. Since the early days of face lifts, a long menu of other cosmetic treatments have steadily appeared even as my firm youth has turned to Jell-O. No longer as committed to accepting my flaccid fate, I study the menus that promise to change my appearance, smooth out my wrinkles, reshape my features, lift my sagging skin, make me more comfortable with my appearance, and boost my self-esteem. Yes! Give me some of that Kool-Aid. The fast food list consists of Botox injections, chemical peels, hair removal, laser skin resurfacing, and non-surgical fat reduction. The ads promise to get me “in and out.” The gourmet cuisine which takes more time to prepare and involves slicing and dicing includes liposuction, breast augmentation, eyelid surgery, tummy tucks, and breast lifts. It sounds a little harsh if not downright scary. An image comes to my mind of road workers resurfacing the highway with deafening heavy equipment. Ouch! Since I try to avoid unnecessary medical interventions and pain, in general, I ask myself, what got me into this flabby, furry state? Maybe if I change my behavior, I can spare myself additional lines, wrinkles, and pesky chin hairs and save a few bucks. So I study the ingredients: too much frowning, squinting, and raising my eyebrows. Even laughter is a culprit. According to the literature, all of these facial expressions have furrowed and folded my skin giving me frown lines, laugh lines, and crow’s feet. My skin is dull from cellular changes, reduced collagen, and free radicals. What to do? My jeans did fit better before my butt cheeks began to slap the backs of my knees, and my shoes did fit better before my thighs drifted downward into my socks. Perhaps enormous lips and three inch eyelashes would distract from these lower regions and boost my glamour profile. Sleep has been hard to come by this week, a week that added greatly to my sagging and dulling, furrowing and eyebrow raising. I don’t think I want to lose too much more sleep over this decision. In the end, I have to consider the times in which I am living. A furrowed brow and free radicals may be my only form of resistance. Let my dull, hairy chin sag! Someday, I will laugh again, too. Dear God, It is me. I am feeling small and shaken today. As you know, there are powerful people calling my home, and one of your finest creations, a garbage can. They are threatening its people, your people, with harm and destruction. These people call so much attention to themselves Lord that I know they must keep you very busy. Many of these people call themselves believers. When they gather, they call it church. They invoke your name as though they have exclusive rights to you. While my faith tells me that is not so, sometimes I fear these folks keep you so busy that you can no longer see me. And so I will try to stand apart today, God, not to rail against what has been given, not to tell you what the Divine Agenda should be, but to reach out and say thank you for all that I have by the tremendous blessing of being born an American. I thank you for this land mass that is my home, a home that spreads from sea to shining sea within a geographic latitude that provides beautiful weather, flowing rivers, fertile soil, plentiful wildlife, and limited barriers. I know that so much of the world is constrained by its physical environment, heat, drought, infertile land, limited natural resources…And yet, you gave all of this to me, to Americans. How lucky are we to have it all—purple mountains majesty, fruited plains, the Grand Canyon and National Parks? You have indeed shed your grace on us. I do see it, God. I really, really do. And I thank you for the wisdom, the will, and the resources that created an expansive highway system that allows us to move freely with no border patrols or agents to slow us down or stop us, that give us the ability to enjoy freedom of movement and American road trips. I believe you gave this to us so that we could connect to one another, see ourselves as neighbors, as the American family. I thank you for our international friends and allies that extend the American family and that help to keep us safe. They open their doors so that we might partake of the majesty that exists in their countries. I thank you for the waterways they share, and the air space they open to American cargo and American travelers. We don’t ever want to be isolated without that. I thank you for yellow school buses that take our children to school each day and for the social safety net that keeps American children from having to beg on the streets as so many children around the world must do to survive. I thank you for public education that nourishes the mind and has grown the American genius, the genius that gave us sanitation, vaccines, and antibiotics. My own father grieved his entire life over the death of his young father from pneumonia in the time before antibiotics. My mother and her brother suffered polio and lived with the lifelong effects because there were no vaccines. Thank you, God, for sparing me, and thank you for America's extraordinary public health services. I thank you for the National Weather Service, the ability of a person to glimpse through God’s eyes and see what’s coming, to predict storms and weather events in time to move people out of harm’s way, and for government relief programs when the storms have passed. I thank you for public libraries and universities that make books and knowledge available to everyone who is interested. I thank you for postal workers who dodge raindrops, dogs, and traffic every day to bring news from loved ones, groceries, and medical supplies right to my door. I thank you for the genius of moving pictures and the entertainment industry, the magic of Disney, public television, public radio, Big Bird, Elmo, and Mr. Rogers. And I thank you for all of the other American mothers and fathers of invention who gave us the Ferris wheel, chocolate chip cookies, dental floss, zippers, hearing aids, cardiac defibrillators, traffic lights, chemotherapy, video games, computers, air conditioning, rubber, peanuts, sweet potatoes and crop rotation, bifocals, telephones, cortisone, air travel, electric power distribution, light bulbs, and so much more. Thank you, God, for all of the people, my own grandparents included, who came to the United States from faraway places in search of a better life in this marvelous country. I know they were grateful. I hope you are proud of their effort and hard work, their tremendous contribution to America’s greatness. I know that I am. Thanksgiving Day is coming, God, but please know that I am not thankful just one day a year. I am awestruck and grateful each morning when I arise in this land of the free. Please help me to be brave. Amen. PS: And, please, God, make America grateful again. Fall is my favorite time of the year. I take to the walking path with a renewed energy after the weariness imposed by the summer’s heat. A trail of tiny yellow and orange leaves lines the path offering a brand of magical candy corn that adds sweetness to every step. The trees rustle their leaves in unison providing me with my own Rocky theme song. Everyone I pass seems friendlier. The trade-off to the splendor of fall is early sunsets and shorter days. Daylight saving time ends at 2 AM on Sunday, November 3rd. For one night, we will “fall back,” and gain an extra hour of sleep. I recall a time in my life when that extra hour of darkness and sleep felt delicious. However, I am now at an age where my own days are growing shorter in number. I wonder if sleeping them away in darkness is the best use of what is left. Throughout my working life there were many people interested my retirement savings. I was bombarded with information about IRAs, 401(k)s, and qualified retirement accounts. There were constant reminders to save along with the contradictory warnings that no matter how much I saved, it might not be enough to get me through a long retirement. But no one spoke to me about my daylight savings. No one asked me if I was putting back enough to get me through any future darkness. Youth is all about the present. There is still so much future, so much hope. There will be time, we think. In our young minds, the future is always bright, and sometimes money and daylight get away from us. Too soon, it is the future, and the vault is low on funds. Busy and optimistic with early dreams of retirement, I never considered that my daylight situation could become precarious. I am wishing I had been a better daylight saver for when the sun goes down, the lights are dim and it is hard to see clearly or at all. The world feels unstable right now. We are ill at ease in our own country. There is so much political turbulence and distrust that it no longer even feels like home. We are blinded by the eerie darkness of so much uncertainty and deliberate misinformation. We are counting down the days to the election, trying to prepare ourselves for an aftermath we cannot quite imagine. Like many, I am fearful of what is to come not just for me but for all of us. I don’t know if I have enough daylight saved. If my daylight savings account runs low, I will have to rely on my social security alone. I will have to hope that good neighbors are watching, the bus driver stops, and the kids call home. And so I ask this of you: be someone’s social security. Share the light you have saved. Make hospitality common again. Let us dazzle the darkness with the light that comes from within. ![]() 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. ![]() A friend of mine recently shared some doubts about an important parenting decision. Feeling her angst, I was reminded of a conversation I once had with my graduate school advisor who said: “It doesn’t matter which side of the tightrope you fall from; either way, you’re dead.” I can’t recall the professional dilemma under discussion when my advisor spoke those words, but the tightrope analogy has proven as applicable to my life as a parent as it did to any of my professional pursuits. When I was a child, I sometimes whined to my mother, “It’s not fair,” as an older sister got to stay up later than me or a younger and only brother got to go on a special outing with our father. “Life’s not fair,” was my mother’s predictable response. Mom didn’t seem to agonize over her parenting decisions, and no further explanations were offered. A lifetime later, I wonder if she lived by that philosophy, or if she tortured herself as I do over what she did for one child and not for another. As a child I firmly resolved, “I WILL NEVER…”and then the realities of parenting set in. Family life does not offer equal opportunity for all. Sometimes our parental resources differ over time leading one child to the conclusion that they are favored less than one of their siblings. As parents, we are young and naïve with the first child, older and more experienced with the next. We are starting out and of little means with the first child, better established with the second, and then paying college tuition for the older children as the last in line moves into high school. One child experiences the brunt of family health crises while another suffers the trauma of a parent’s job loss. One child grows up in the same neighborhood attached to lifelong friends and neighbors while another is torn from his moorings by a parent’s job relocation. Sometimes divorce, dating, remarriage, and blending families add to the juggling act. And those are just the parent-driven life changes. The world intervenes too. Everything from politics to health care affects family life. Will the children growing up through the COVID years feel differently about the parenting they received than children growing up before or after? Will high inflation and social unrest affect choices and decisions about things like where to go to college and a child’s evaluation of what is “fair”? Will there be a medical treatment available for one that was not yet approved for use by another? The basic and differing temperaments of the child play a role too. We can’t know what will come wrapped in that bundle of joy. Temperament is like the seed inside a fruit. The flesh grows around it. One child is born independent and eager to be out in the world. “Don’t hold my hand,” she says. The next child comes along, quiet, reserved, and hesitant: “Don’t let go of my hand,” he says. One child needs independence another needs a slow and gentle release. One child is impulsive and needs plenty of rules and oversight. The other is capable of adult judgment and full of moral resolve in preschool. Sometimes a child’s temperament is at odds with that of a parent or parents. Despite great love, there is also great opportunity for frustration and misunderstanding. And just when you think you’ve got the system down, one child suddenly blossoms in an unexpected way and another suffers an unexpected crisis. As our parents warned, the worst payback can be when a child is too much like us. Our worst or most challenging features can slap us in our faces making every interaction a contest. Other times, our children are so different from us that we feel lost about how to nurture them or their interests. As everyone weighs in: family, friends, casual observers, teachers, coaches, therapists, parenting “experts,” Dr. Phil, and even uneducated TikTok influencers with issues of their own, we teeter on the tightrope wondering if we are just overly-sensitive and embarrassed, or if we are experiencing an actual boundary violation or invasion of privacy. Society grooms us to believe that if we are competent, if we love our children enough, parenting will be easy. While we have to make room and find opportunities for the gifts our children carry, we still need to keep our own lights on. There is no practice or dress rehearsal regardless of how large a family you come from, how much babysitting you did as a teenager, or how you make your living. With parenting, we don’t get any pre-performance practice. The 10,000 hours of rehearsal that makes one a master, comes while on the job. In those 10,000 hours, your child becomes a grown-up. I never saw myself as an athlete, but I wish I had understood at the outset that parenting is a tightrope act considered by many to be an extreme sport. We step onto the wire with a baby in our hands. We have to develop mental fortitude, toughness, and a comfort with heights while in the thrilling but risky emotional state of ecstasy combined with terror. Making our way on the parenting tightrope requires focus and small, thoughtful steps, while never giving up on the belief that we can make it, we will make it, even at those times when we live suspended in mid-air unable to move. Inch by inch we pray that our children will come to understand it all on some day in the future, perhaps when they have children of their own. Parenting is life on the wire, my friend. Sometimes it seems like a circus, but there is only one way to do it: keep looking ahead. |
AuthorLilli-ann Buffin Archives
January 2025
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