YOU'RE DOING GREAT; NOW, LEAVE ME ALONE

When my daughters were toddlers and beyond, I responded to their actions and words by naming them -- clever, resourceful, kind, persistent etc. Sometimes, I would tell them something was unkind or dangerous, Now, my daughters are doing the same with their children.  They are going beyond "good job" and "stop that" to name the qualities they are seeing.  

I applaud this feedback.

It appears, however, that a great many people did not receive positive feedback from their parents and caregivers. or possibly they received a boatload of negative feedback. How else to explain the multiple requests for assessment I receive daily?

Almost every time I visit a doctor, hire someone to provide a service, or order something online, a survey asking how he/she/they did will follow.  Sometimes the requests for assessment come before the service is provided . . .

Seriously?  Are they that needy?

I have a life, people.  I'm not going to fill out your surveys.  

Here's another puzzlement.  I listen to a lot of podcasts, which often involve interviews.  It used to be that an interviewee would occasionally respond to a question by saying, "That's a great question."  Now, hardly an interview goes by without these words being spoken.

Honestly, the questions aren't always all that great.  And even if they are, isn't it the job of the interviewer to ask great questions? Is the interviewee stalling in order to come up with an answer? Inquiring minds want to know.  

And while I'm on my soapbox, I'm also not going to open the multiple texts I receive asking for money.  I'm going to block those numbers every time.  It's not that I'm against making charitable contributions.  To the contrary, I make them regularly. It's just that I don't want to see these requests in my text feed. Texts are for brief communications with family and friends.  

So, leave me alone, already. 

Same with requests for political contributions.  Not on my text feed.  Not on your life.  

And then there are the phone calls.  I no longer answer calls from unknown phone numbers.  If a call isn't from a scammer, I assume the caller will leave a message.  Come to think of it, scammers leave messages too . . .

For some reason email stopped working on my phone a few months ago, and I decided not to try to fix it.  So, I'm not dealing with those incessant dings anymore. Yay!  (Actually, a friend suggested turning off notifications for emails, which I did, but not having emails on my phone is even better.)

As for people who come to the house wanting to sell me something, I try to be polite.  I tell them they may give me literature, but I will not agree to anything while speaking through my front door.  (And I'm definitely not inviting them in.)

So, is it just me or do I have companions in wanting to ward off these intrusions?

 

                                        Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash

UBI SUNT? (Where Are They?)

Yesterday I deleted three people from my phone's contact list.  No, I had not had a falling out with any of them, although you might say they had fallen from my life and the lives of those who loved them.  To put the matter bluntly, they had died--one recently, one a couple of years ago, and one a few years before that.

It was only while searching for someone on my list yesterday that I realized I had no further use for these folks' phone numbers and email addresses.  Still, the deleting felt strange, unsettling.  

It felt wrong to erase these traces of people with whom I had been more or less close, so I'm going to share a few sentences about each in order to counteract the deletions. 

I saw a lot of Charlie back in my 30s.  He was married to a very close friend. We had meals together (he was a great cook) and talked about books (he was an antiquarian book seller and a poet).  Our contacts were sporadic after he and my friend divorced, yet the connection was not severed entirely.  He read, critiqued, and encouraged my writing, and occasionally sent me a book.  

I didn't know Rick well--well enough, though, to have him in my contact list.  In my experience, he was a fine man - kind and thoughtful, a musician and a reader and a dedicated volunteer.  One of his last kindnesses was to replace the wooden handle on my husband's wheelbarrow.  

I had a fairly close friendship with Brian.  We shared a love of writing and would read one another's stories. We also talked about our kids over lunch several times a year.  I will always regret not calling him in the weeks before he suddenly and unexpectedly died. 

I had known all three, and then they were gone, gone whether or not they remained in my contact list. 

The words that came into my head while making these deletions were these: Ubi sunt?  Let me explain. Many years ago, one of my college English professors shared a Latin quotation, which he said meant something like, "Where are they, those who went before us?" 

In any event, I could only remember the first two words, perhaps glued to my brain by the pleasure of the oo sound twice repeated.  I had to look up the rest. Here it is:  Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?

Ubi sunt, indeed. 

Does anyone really leave us in this digital age?  I confess I have not deleted, and do not intend to delete, the last two phone messages from my brother Jim, who died over a year ago.  Listening to his voice now and then makes me smile.

And there is this:  Two of the three people whose contacts I deleted still have active Facebook pages.  That's right.  Their Facebook "friends" can go back and look at what the departed had posted.  Is this a good thing?  I don't know. Maybe it's a comfort to those left behind. Maybe it's macabre. 

You decide.  

But let's return to the cosmic question:  Where are they now?  I tend toward the Taoist view that we come from what is whole, enter the world of forms, and upon our deaths, return to what is whole.  In his "Intimations Ode," the poet William Wordsworth wrote, "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting . . . Not in entire forgetfulness,/And not in utter nakedness,/But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God who is our home. .."**  (You might substitute The Tao or Love for the word God, if that is more comfortable.). 

Wordsworth's lines were echoed by something my daughter Anne said at about age three or three-and-a-half.  She first asked, "Where was I before I was born?" Then, before I could take a moment to respond, she announced, "I know. I was part of all of the love."

Wow. 

In the same poem, Wordsworth went on to write about the memory fading as we grow older.  Apparently, Anne had yet to forget.  And if we come from an undivided experience of love, is that what we return to?  I would like to think so. That's what those who have had near-death experiences describe.  (NDEs, however, are a subject for another day.) 

Listen, I'm not trying to convince you of anything.  I'm just giving you my intuitions with regard to ubi sunt.  If I am wrong, and all is dark after death, I will never know. 

I do know this.  When we delete someone from our contacts, we do not delete memory or affection.  Those who have mattered to us live on in our hearts while we are here, and maybe that is enough.

** The full title of the poem:  "ODE:  Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood"

Photo by Dario Brönnimann on Unsplash