ARE MY EARS BLEEDING?

          About 30 years ago, I read the novel Easy Travel to Other Planets by Ted Mooney.  Of course, I have forgotten most of the plot.  One of the things that I do remember is that some characters suffered from “information sickness,” which caused bleeding from the ears. 

         It was prescient of Mooney to posit information sickness in 1981, when the book was published.  I doubt, however, that he could have imagined the flow of information that now inundates us at every turn. 

         When Easy Travel was published, there were, after all, no smart phones.  There was no Facebook.  No Twitter.

         Now our phones are alive with text messages, emails, phone messages, and lists of missed calls.  If we don’t check for an hour, we might miss something.  I understand that many young people respond to bings and bleeps from their phones all night.  When do they sleep?

         I confess to being overwhelmed.  Take email, for instance.  When email started playing a role at work, it seemed, for a while, like a good thing—until the constant appearance of incoming emails became a permanent distraction.  And then there was the fact that you could no longer peruse a letter and take some time to ponder your reply.  A response was expected NOW, and 24/7.  If you had a smart phone, why couldn’t you be on call all of the time?

         Personal email is no less vexing.  No matter how frequently I unsubscribe from retailers, my email inbox still fills up with unwanted sales pitches.  I have sometimes failed to notice a personal email among the onslaught of junk mail.

         And now there is Facebook, with which I have a love/hate relationship.  I have tinkered with my settings so that I will not be bombarded with constant emails telling me who has posted what on FB.  But I find that I am tempted to check FB more frequently than feels comfortable, just in case I might be missing something.   I, along with a great many others, have been hooked by an intermittent reward system.    We are apparently more likely to repeat a behavior when the rewards are intermittent, than when they are constant.  Sure, much of what is on FB is of no moment, but what if there is a grandkid photo today?  Or a link to a thoughtful article?

         Of course, email and FB are also dandy procrastination devices.  I spent more time checking email and Facebook when I was writing a Masters thesis two years ago than at any time before or since. 

         And let us not forget the news.  When I graduated from college, I worked for a while as a reporter for a local paper.  There was a machine in the newsroom that constantly spewed forth a ticker tape with the latest wire service news reports.  When there was an election, we would work late to answer phone calls from people wanting to know about the returns.  Now, every computer and phone serves the function of a ticker tape, updating the news from moment to moment.  There is no respite.

         No wonder I am tempted to check my ears for bleeding. 

         So what is to be done?  My husband, who does not own a smart phone and would not be caught dead on Facebook, thinks the answer is simple:  Get off of Facebook.  I am not ready to do this.  I like seeing what my daughters and his sons are up to.  This is where they post photographs.  Also, I have reconnected with some people on FB and it is a nice place to share feelings when something important happens in the world. 

         Still, there have to be ways to step back.  Here are some things that I have done, and am doing, by way of interrupting the constant flow of information.  I would love to hear your suggestions.

         - I turn off the sound on my phone at night. 

         (While my mother was alive, I was constantly on call for the latest crisis.  It took me a while after her death earlier this year to understand that I could turn off my phone without letting anyone down.)

- I am trying to remember to turn off my phone while I am eating, especially when I am eating with others, including my husband. 

         - I carry my phone, but turn off the sound, when I am on a walk. (I feel safer having it with me when I am walking the dog in the woods.) 

         - I leave my phone in the house when I am gardening.  I turn off the sound when I am writing.

         - I am vowing to check Facebook less often.  I will start by backing off to every other day or every third day, and then re-evaluate.   (The photos, I remind myself, will still be there when I check in.)

         - I am contemplating a technology Sabbath—one day a week when I stay off of my computer and ipad and do not read emails on my phone.  (Have any of you done this successfully?)

        

         I can do this, right?  After all, until I was in my mid-thirties  telephones were tethered to the wall and had handsets that were tethered to the base of the phone.  There was no “voice mail.”  If someone called you and you weren’t home to answer, you didn’t know about the call. 

And, most of the time, it didn’t matter. 

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

         

BLURRING OUR LINES IN THE SAND

         So, is it just me, or have the last couple of weeks been particularly horrible for humankind?  I know that the world has always been full of violence, and I can remember other awful, violent times.  I have, after all, lived through the two Kennedy Assassinations (Jack and Bobby), the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, the Viet Nam war, two Iraq wars, the war in Afghanistan, 9/11, and much more.  All of this notwithstanding, I feel overwhelmed by recent headlines:  The heartbreak of the downed airplane, the intractability of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the determination of ISIS to drag Iraq and its neighbors into the Dark Ages.  Maybe, I am just getting too old for all of this hatred.  Or maybe it is that I have lost patience with certainty, both political certainty and religious certainty (which, for me includes not only religious fundamentalism but also what I call fundamentalist atheism). 

         We are finite beings living in, and trying to understand, an apparently infinite universe.  We are hurtling through space on a planet that circles a star that is only one among countless stars.  We are doing our best to make sense of this, but, really, what do we know?  So how is it that anyone is so certain that his/her narrative or worldview is the only possible acceptable narrative or worldview that he/she is willing to kill for it?  (And before we get too self-satisfied about the fact that we are not among the killers, we might consider whether we have ever been judgmental, nasty or intolerant of the views of others without spending much or any time trying to understand those views.) 

            What if we were to admit that we are all like the blind men and the elephant, each groping for an explanation from our limited vantage point?  What if there is more than one truth?  What if we, for all our scientific breakthroughs, are still very far from understanding much of anything? 

         Of course, I have deeply held beliefs, the most basic of which is that we should be guided by compassion. But, the older I get, the less interest I have in religious or political dogma, and the more willing I become to entertain the idea that I could be on the wrong track.  I have, in short, come to appreciate curiosity over certainty. 

         What if we were to kick at the lines that we have drawn in the sand and blur them a bit?  What if, instead of drawing lines in the sand, we were to build sand castles that would depict our dreams?  What if instead of feeling scorn for those who do not see things our way we were to explore our common dreams?

         What would the world look like then?

         

WHY DO THEY DO THAT???

After six decades on this earth, I find that Guy Noir is not the only one with persistent questions.  Here are some of mine:

Why do:

- men assume that they get all of the space in an airplane row of seats? 

OK.  OK.  Maybe women do this sometimes too, but in my experience it has always been men.*  I am not talking here about the dilemma posed by sharing a row with a large person. I am talking about the average-sized man who sits down in his seat and  immediately spreads his knees apart as far as they will go and plops his elbows on both arm rests.  Were these guys raised by wolves?  Oh.  Wait.  I have no reason to believe that wolves have such bad manners.

            *Of course, there was the time when I sat down next to a very young woman on a bus, and found to my dismay that it was not going to occur to her to uncross her stiletto-clad left foot from the top of her right knee, where it remained poised to attack my left knee for the entire trip. . . .

- store clerks refer to the inventory as if they own it?   

So, you walk up to a store clerk and ask, “Where are the frozen peas?” and the clerk responds, “My peas are on aisle three toward the back, or “I am out of frozen peas, but I have some nice fresh asparagus.”  Really?  Does s/he think that I will believe that s/he owns the store, but comes in to stock the shelves in order to stay in touch with the little people? 

-  store clerks ask for a phone number?

Really?  Any phone number?  It doesn’t have to be mine?

- store clerks ask for the “last four of your social”?

Not sure what this means, but it sounds personal. 

- radio stations announce that “meteorologist Joe/Jane Blow is calling for torrential rain/tornados/(fill in your weather horror of choice here)”?

I get that meteorologists have to predict the weather, however ugly, but why would anyone employ a meteorologist who calls for ugly weather?

- people leave their engines running while waiting for a bridge-lift to be over?

These events usually last at least ten minutes. This is not the Indianapolis 500, folks  – A fast take off is not imperative.

- robot voices on phone trees pretend to be real people?

Does company XYZ really think it is making this a more pleasant experience by having a recorded voice say, "I'm sorry.  I didn't get that.  Could you please repeat it?"?  If you want to make it a pleasant experience, how about HIRING SOME REAL PEOPLE TO ANSWER THE PHONES?, she asked sweetly.  

I feel better now.  I would love to hear your persistent questions.

MY MOTHER DIDN'T WEAR MAKE-UP . . . or did she?

           My mother, who passed away a month ago, was a beautiful woman.  Here is a photo of her looking Ingrid Bergman-esque in her 1949 passport photo, when she was 29.   

    

 (For any young folks reading this -  if the name Ingrid Bergman doesn’t ring a bell, run, don’t walk, to rent or stream one of the greatest movies of all time, Casa Blanca.)

        Of course, the bloom was off the rose by the time she passed at nearly 94, but I remember her as still pretty all the way through her 60s, and holding her own after that. 

         Something that I also remember is admiring the fact that she didn’t wear, and didn’t need to wear, much makeup.  During the years when I still lived at home, I don’t remember her using anything more than lipstick. So, why, when she died, did I find drawers full of makeup?  Not just lipstick, but face powder and eyeliner, too.  Seriously, I threw away a couple of bags of the stuff.   

         I am left asking:  Was the no-makeup thing all in my mind?  Sure I knew that she tried to put on lipstick up until a couple of years before she died – frequently to comic effect, as her eyesight was failing.  But dozens of lipsticks?  And the face powder?  And eyeliner? Who was this woman?

         I think that is a question that we all wind up asking when we are left with the remnants of a parent’s life.

         I did my best to tell my mom’s story at her memorial service, but what do any of us know really about our parents’ early lives?*  Sure I remember stories that my parents told, but I can’t really picture their lives before I came along when they were 29 and 37.  In fact, I have no clear memories of them until I was probably 12 years old, when my mom was in her early 40s and my dad was pushing 50.  So what am I to make of the very early photos of them that I am currently sifting through?

         Like this one, for instance . . .        

        

My mother never even had a driver’s license.  What is she doing on this motorcycle?  I know that my dad had motorcycles in his youth.  Is she posing for him?  Or did she have a life as a motorcycle driver that I know nothing about?

         And how about this picture of my dad, which I suspect was taken when he and my mother were preparing to hike in the highlands, as they often did in their youth?

Can this impossibly young man really be my father?

         So this is what I am thinking about today:  We really have no access to our parents' early lives in any three-dimensional kind of way.  We don't have the cultural reference points, except as dusty history.  What can I really know about what it was like to grow up in Scotland and experience a world war?  (Two for my father, if you count his early childhood.)  What can I know about what it felt like to leave family and friends behind and immigrate to another country?  And then another?  What do I know about their passions and their fears?  

         And the same will be true for our children. There is the stuff that we don't want to share and the stuff that we are afraid will bore them.  And even the stuff they want to hear about will be one-dimensional for them as well.  My daughters didn't know me as a skinny, awkward elementary school student.  They never knew a world where nearly all mothers stayed at home and kids played freely on the street until called in for dinner.  They can't know what it was like to be a teenager in the '60s.  (Awesome.)  They can't know what it felt like to scream my lungs out at a Beatles concert or to go "down the  shore" with my friends in New Jersey.  They weren't there (thank God) for my early marriage at 23-going-on-17, when someone should have mentioned that I did not have the emotional maturity to even be thinking about marriage.  And so much more.

        Each generation is a mystery to the next.  And why shouldn't it be?  Where would we put all of those feelings if we could really experience what our parents experienced? 

        And still, as I sort through my mother's photograph collection, I am so grateful to have a window -- however one-dimensional -- on her world.  

*  I shared a bit of my parents’ story in an earlier post:  ROOTS (or where is the place we call home?)

HOW TO ATTEND YOUR OWN MEMORIAL SERVICE WITHOUT HAVING TO DIE

                  Have you ever wondered what people will say at your memorial service? 

            No?  Me either.  But I think I just found out. 

            Two nights ago, my husband and two dear friends threw a retirement party for me.   It was lovely and overwhelming.   Amazing friends.  Amazing food.  A blur of greetings and well wishes. 

            Toward the end of the evening my friend Noelle, a school teacher, used her professional skills to quiet the din in the room, and then invited people to speak.  Some of the speakers had apparently been lined up in advance, some not.  I sat in a chair and listened to people say lovely things about me, things that are generally not said this side of a memorial service.  

            And I didn’t have to die.   

            It was kind of an out-of-body experience, at once humbling and mortifying.  I was deeply moved by the love and friendship in the room, even as I struggled to recognize the person being lauded.     

           

            I tell you this not to toot my own horn.  Your friends would do the same.  (And like mine, they would – given the occasion – refrain from mentioning your less adorable qualities.)

            I write here to share what I understood while surrounded by friends on Saturday night and while thinking about the dear ones who were unable to be present or who live too far away to have been invited.  Here it is:  The measure of my life so far is not in my accomplishments.—not in the appellate briefs that I wrote over the course of my legal career or in the weekly garden column that I wrote for several years or in the degrees that I have earned. 

            It is in my relationships.  It is in the people who surrounded me on Saturday night and those who were unable to be there.  My book group.  My writing group.  My co-workers.  My fellow students.  My husband.  My amazing daughters.  Their father.  The friends who have been with me for years and those who entered my life more recently.  The people who have seen me through and given my life meaning.  Without these people none of the “accomplishments” would have been possible, nor would they have mattered a bit.

            When I was in college, my father (an engineer) lamented my choice of English as my major.  “But, it’s not productive,” he would say.   He was right.  And I didn’t care.  For better or worse, I have always valued connection (whether with dead authors or living people) over productivity, and Saturday night I felt the rewards of this approach.  I could feel the roundness and fullness of my life.  I could feel the intersecting currents of my connections buoying me up and the questions about whether I could have been more productive or more ambitious floating away.

            I am so very grateful to know that I have friends and loved ones who will see me through as I move forward into the next chapter of my life. 

            My cup runneth over.    

   Photo by Santiago Lacarta on Unsplash