My wife had a birthday recently. It was a number neither of us had thought much about before, and she did not approach the topic nor the day with her usual cheerfulness. As a general rule, I recommend collecting as many birthdays as possible, and will not complain about having another as long as I can continue to have them at all. As we sat outside drinking coffee, right around the crack of 8am, she began to list several things that she could no longer do. Many of those things are common to others at or near our age, like sitting on the floor and getting back up unassisted, reading anything at all without glasses, eating spicy foods without paying a painful price later, remembering anything for more than 10 minutes and picking up anything that weighs more than about 15 pounds or so without resultant back issues. I mentioned my balance seemed to grow progressively worse with each passing week, and that my eyesight at night made my driving an iffy proposition after dusk (which is a pretty good thing this time of year because 9 or 9:30 is the new midnight for us, and that I had to change one password 3 times in less than 20 minutes because I was too stubborn to write it down and kept convincing myself I would remember it. After a few minutes of this, we decided that thinking about things we couldn’t do as easily as we once could just might be the wrong way to approach the day, so we started instead to list some of the things we could do that, once upon a time, we couldn’t.
For example, I never get asked whether or not I qualify for the senior discount. She noted that we get a call from the grandson in Tuscaloosa every other day, and never have to go inside to answer it or listen for “our ring” to determine whether or not it’s meant for us. Neither of us has used a rotary dial phone hanging on the wall with a 12-foot tangled cord for years. In fact, we can wander around the house, go outside on the porch or out by the pool and never have to redial. We haven’t really had a “home phone” in the traditional sense for longer than I can remember. Using an app on our phones that allows visual and audio, we can see faces and locations while talking, just in case hearing them is not enough. We can use our televisions to watch almost any show that’s ever been created, including “Gone with the Wind,” Andy Griffith, Adam 12 and Dragnet, and can magically change the channel and volume from anywhere in the room without getting up. It’s almost funny though when Joe Friday or Pete Malloy ask if they can borrow someone’s house phone to call an ambulance or to check in with the station or when Andy picks up the phone and speaks to Sarah, the operator. We never have to wait for Sunday night to make a long-distance call because the rates are cheaper. We have the ability to use our computer to order anything from anywhere and have it delivered to our front door in less than a week. We also made new friends with the UPS guys that bring the stuff to us. Using email, we can contact almost anyone in the world in almost any part of the world and have a conversation without saying a word. We can keep up with relatives, former students, old neighbors or even those nice people from India that are constantly worrying about our car warranty and health care status. They seem very interested in our welfare until Betsy tells them she has a 1942 Ford or Medicare is not available in our location on the moon.
Even more amazing is that we have what amounts to a constantly updated Encyclopedia Britannica at our fingertips all day every day. Forgot a particular word to express a specific nuance? Look it up. Need to know what haricot verts are because you really don’t want to accidentally order anything related to escargot? Look it up. How about the dates of the Peloponnesian War? There it is! It was 431-404 BC and fought between Greece, Athens and Sparta. Did that driver in the other car call you something inappropriate in Italian? Figlio di….nevermind. Want to know the score of the latest (or any) Braves game? Easy peasy.
Feeling a little under the weather? Your doctor, through telehealth, can visit you instead of you going to them. Medications once thought miraculous that cure or prevent catastrophic diseases are available at any corner pharmacy, and lifesaving operations are conducted on a daily basis in rooms specifically designed for the purpose. Small incisions that allow microscopic cameras to see inside your body have revolutionized surgical techniques, scars and recovery times.
Bathrooms are practically all indoors now, and plumbing is the rule instead of the exception for the overwhelming majority of American households. When was the last time you or anyone in your immediate family, responding to the insistent persistent call of nature at the most inopportune times, used an outhouse, braving the wind, cold, heat, rain and a variety of animals and the overpowering smell of years of collective deposits and an old Sears catalog? I hope it’s been a long time, and may you never have that experience again. Great Grandma and her outhouse never knew the joys of floral scented spray or disinfectant. She and her family at the time took a bath once a month whether they needed it or not and did so with water they hauled from the pump and heated over a wood fire and with soap they made themselves. Just thinking about it makes me want to take a shower.
Great Grandma also used to sweep the yard almost every week. I haven’t swept our yard in, like, ever.
Machines that regulate the internal temperature of homes have replaced ceiling fans and fireplaces for all but aesthetic reasons, and suffering from the weather is, for many of us, the surreptitious alteration of the thermostat up and down by spouses determined to frustrate your personal temperature preferences and concern for the power bill. Cars and trucks all have AC now. Our AC in the car used to be the little side vents that Daddy pushed open to smoke.
News from everywhere and anywhere in the world is available at your fingertips all day, every day and from a wide variety of sources and devices. Equally important is your ability to ignore them all at your convenience. While I understand how difficult it must be to fill 24 hours of television or radio time with really big important news stuff, neither sensationalism nor politics holds the intense need to know for us that it seems to hold on many others. I stopped watching national and local news in 1973 when I found myself yelling at Richard Nixon on television, letting everyone know in the apartment building and surrounding vicinity that in spite of his feeble protests, yes, he was a crook. I am a nicer person when I don’t watch the news and haven’t missed it at all. Reading, while less sensational, provides a more balanced picture of truth as opposed to a constant state of outrage from one side or the other. It’s also better for your health.
Speaking of reading, my kindle reader can access millions of books for a cost less than the gasoline it would take for me to drive to the nearest library and back, and I don’t have to try and remember where my library card is and whether or not they remember that book I never returned in 1981.
The GPS in my truck is one of the handiest gadgets ever invented, and I haven’t had a real honest to goodness map in the glove compartment in years. Sometimes it does go a little haywire and seems to want to take me to places it wants me to see rather than the places I want to go, but my deadlines for arrival don’t have the urgency they once did, so I just go along for the ride and the new experiences. We did miss a turn on the way back from Florida during what must have been a satellite outage a few months ago and ended up in Mitylene outside of Montgomery, but easily found our way home from there. It was a bit longer but a rather scenic drive past the site of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Who knew?
We have a refrigerator and freezer inside our house that keeps stuff cold and/or frozen for long periods of time, and that means we don’t have to have a root cellar under the house to preserve vegetables. I can’t remember the last time we had to can anything, and never do without any vegetable or fruit because it’s out of season. It’s cheaper and much more convenient to buy it already canned or even fresh from the gigantic grocery just down the street. That also means we don’t have to hoe or otherwise tend a garden and fight the deer in the yard for every plant.
All is not peaches and cream with technology in the world of the seasoned citizen, however, so rather than fight with tech people on the phone from Pakistan or Nepal, we have learned to save those malfunctioning or nonoperational devices until one of our sons or grandkids come over and solves the issue in about 10 minutes. I rather enjoy the lack of pressure that puts on me to provide a solution for a device I generally know how to operate but understand very little about its internal processes and mechanics. I did carry my iPhone to a repair man once because it failed to hold a charge. My suggested solution was to replace the battery. He took a bent paper clip and cleaned the lint out of the charging slot. I felt a little foolish but was happy to pay his $20 cleaning fee instead of the $90 for a new battery.
All in all, though, technology has made our lives easier, more comfortable, longer and more complicated all at once, and when you look at history and the struggles of people just to live, much less live in comfort, this is a pretty amazing time for us to be alive. The real point really is that life is more fun for you and for those around you if you are a positive person, laugh a lot and are happier more often than not. Abe Lincoln once noted that most people are about as happy as they want to be. I think he’s correct and would rather spend my time smiling and looking for silver linings than watching and worrying about the big dark cloud behind them. I decided long ago that the best part of experiencing 25,975 successive mornings to date is that I still enjoy seeing the next one when it arrives. I hope you do too, and that you take a few minutes each day to be thankful you are still here to be a part of it, and that you spend at least part of every day being about as happy as you want to be.
You are correct Steve. We should have played it and I have no explanation as to why we didn’t. Perhaps because the James Bond theme was a step above menial local John law.
I find I have acquired quite a few pairs of readers approaching the volume of Fred Sanford's top bureau draw, and my arms aren't quite long enough.
Recently, I started watching Adam-12 again. I loved it on Saturday afternoons as a kid (I was born a little after it started and it was in syndication by the time I was old enough to understand). Back then, I liked Reed, but now that I have matured, Malloy has the right amount of snark, optimism, and humanity. Some things age well.
Also, why did we never play the theme song to that show? I think the '85-'90 LCHS Band of Gold horn section would have nailed it!