Porches Are So Passe

Porches are so passé.

They were once as necessary to any home as a bathroom, but for at least the last thirty years they have been completely forgotten, or reinvented in the back yard as a deck. They are like the Jitterbug, which though it is just about the most fun you can have standing up, is still, to most of us, little more than a piece of our parent’s history. 

There is sadness in that my friends.

I blame the relentless advancement of technology for this. Porches were once the only place one could go to escape the hot, sticky dog days of summer. Once Willis Haviland Carrier determined that warm air blown over cold coils could control the temperature and humidity of an enclosed room, however, the only people left sitting on their front porches were smokers. Those who, having been ignominiously ejected from that cool, air conditioned space, were left to watch the wisps of gray smoke from their cigarettes dissipate in the stagnant air.

Sitting on the porch not only cooled you off (as much as that was possible), but it also gave you an opportunity to palaver with your neighbors. But if air conditioning had not already been in the process of ending that particular habit of nocturnal nattering, then radio was certainly doing its best to sever its jocular jugular. After David Sarnoff of RCA popularized radio and made it possible for most families to own at least one of those console behemoths, and both you and your neighbor had one, his infantile babbling suddenly became something you could turn off by turning on the radio.

And of course the more affordable radio became, the more radios a home had, the more splintered families became as individual tastes were given individual expression on individual radios.

Good bye dinner conversation, hello Fibber McGee and Molly.

Television followed the same general path of technological skullduggery as radio. If radio brought the family inside to the air conditioned comfort of their living room, thereby abandoning the breathless banter of their neighbors on front porches across the way, then TV did the same thing to the movie industry. Replicated across the breadth and depth of America, it pulled those same people, and hundreds of thousands of people just like them, from the congenial confines of a darkened movie theater to that same air conditioned room. Now, instead of listening to the static drone of “The Shadow” they watched the ludicrous lamentations of a fiery redhead in “I Love Lucy.”

The desertion of these movie goers did little more to the movie industry than to compel it to innovate and to attempt to improve upon the product it offered to its no longer adoring public. More importantly was what television did to those who traded the movie theater, with its throngs of popcorn munchers, for the darkened privacy or their living room, and later their bedrooms, as the number of TVs grew like the population of China. It splintered the larger public group of movie goers into smaller and smaller nuggets of TV watching humanity. 

In short it did what radio did, only better. It isolated people from other people.

The technological advances of radios and TVs laid the groundwork for future generations of portable electrical whiz bang devices that allowed, yet again, the splintering of society. We all know what they were; 8 track tapes, cassette players, VHS tapes, DVDs. But, when compared to the glittering dome of the ubiquitous Internet, they were all like children constructing buildings with sticky popsicle sticks while envisioning the towering spire of an Empire State Building.

 The Internet of course is the preeminent culprit responsible for the splintering of society. It has taken the technology of Radio and Television and added virtually every other communicative technology currently known and rolled it up in one convenient package. It is now possible to live, and some would say thrive, without benefit of human contact.

To those of you out there who even now are grabbing their computer monitors and throttling them as though it was my scrawny neck, let me just say this: chill.

I can’t be the only one who recognizes the difference between manipulating electrons to scroll text across a computer screen and a handshake, a pat on the back, or the faint brushing of cheeks to say, “It’s been awhile, so what have you been up to?”

Certainly that’s better than nothing, though, right? Better to scan the text scrolling across a computer screen than to remember, faintly, that last hello of so many years ago.

Maybe. Maybe not. The point of all this tripe is to suggest that over time it will become easier, even preferable, to manipulate those electrons than it will be to reach out and shake that hand.

I am almost certainly an alarmist. I do not want to be without the advances in technology I have spent these last minutes haranguing, but it would not take a monumental leap of the imagination to speculate that a future is possible in which human interaction becomes as mysterious a thing as the Jitterbug. It is not the stuff of Science Fiction, but probably where we will ultimately find ourselves.

I am as solitary an individual as most of you will probably ever meet, but even I do not want to be a part of that world.

Coincidences: More Than Mere Happenstance

I am listening to my MP3 player, a book called Bloodroot in which women from a given family are blessed, or cursed, with unusual powers, when the narrator says the word ‘focus’ at the exact same time that I look at the rear of the Ford in front of me and my eyes land on the word Focus.

I have spent the better part of two days trying to decipher the meaning and purpose behind this oddly intriguing coincidence. It reminded me of another coincidence that happened a number of years ago when my wife and I met my niece in a restaurant we frequented in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. My niece lived in Southwick, Massachusetts, a good twenty miles away. Admittedly she had her own life and there could have been any number of reasons she would be in the same restaurant at the same time as my wife and me. It turns out that the restaurant was in a small mall with seating in a promenade and she was there to pick up a resized engagement ring she had dropped off some time previously at a local jeweler.

Coincidences , by their very definition, are events that happen by chance, but seem to have some connection. We’ve all experienced them, I’m sure, but most people, maybe all people, maybe everyone in the known world and universe but me, shrugs them off as, well, coincidences; of no more significance than finding something a week after you thought you had lost it.

But maybe there is more to it than that. Maybe these coincidences are really nodes, critical points of decision that propel an incredibly convoluted and complicated process in one direction or another. And perhaps knowing this, knowing of the existence of these nodes and the associated process, allows one to consciously and significantly affect that process, even if the ultimate purpose of the process is unknown.

So my niece shows up at a restaurant in East Longmeadow, twenty miles from home, ostensibly to get an engagement ring resized. In the end it turns out the engagement is called off, so her whole trip to East Longmeadow was for naught. But perhaps there was another reason for our meeting. Perhaps at this particular node we were destined to make certain choices, which we did, and those choices propelled the process in directions it would otherwise never have considered going and toward an end which had now caused it to deviate significantly from what it was just minutes before.

And perhaps my unique mental acuity has allowed me to recognize these coincidences, these nodes for what they are, and the apparently innocuous intersection of the word ‘focus’ spoken in an MP3 book at the same time I glance at a Ford Focus in front of me is really a message, an instruction, a warning to, obviously, focus.

Focus on what you might reasonably ask? Any answer might do here I suppose, but it seems pretty obvious to me that the instruction was to focus on honing the ability to recognize the nodes and to take decisive action when one is presented.

The next obvious step, of course, would be to know with certainty what would be the ramifications of decisions made or not made at these particular nodes, and their effect on the process.

But that way certainly leads to madness.

The Imminent Beatification of John Paul II

Pope John Paul II is on the fast track to beatification, presumably because his successor, Pope Benedict XVI has determined that among the requisite miracles a deceased Pope must perform was that of curing a French nun with Parkinson’s disease who prayed to John Paul within months of his death. The fact that John Paul also suffered from Parkinson’s perhaps being the pump priming the post Pope needed to perform this miracle. Apparently he couldn’t cure himself of the disease when he was alive, but could, under just the right circumstances, cure a single nun of the disease after he vibrated into the afterlife.

Kind of makes you wonder, if this lucky nun had brought a dozen or so similarly afflicted souls to also pray to John Paul, if they would also have been as miraculously cured.  Or was there something uniquely special about her. Perhaps John Paul simply liked the mellifluous flow of her name, Maria Helena Pombo. Too bad then, if your name is Jane Jones with the same disease.

A few things bother me about this. The first, obviously, is that this beatification, this sainthood, is being bestowed upon John Paul based, at least in part, on the testimony of a single individual. Of the more than 300 miracles being attributed to John Paul this one wasn’t the strongest, but it was apparently strong enough, whatever that means in Vaticanese. I guess the burden of proof for something as magnificent as a miracle lies with those who find it suspect. Prove a negative, prove the miracle didn’t happen.

Secondly, the proof of this alleged miracle is being sworn to by the medial investigators of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Without knowing anything else I would at least want to know the medial credentials of these individuals and to whom their loyalties lay, with the truth or the Vatican. The skeptic in me suspects the latter, making this a bit like the board of directors of BP investigating the Deepwater Horizon oil spill behind closed doors and finding themselves completely absolved of all responsibility.

Thirdly, part of the reason for the fast tracking of John Paul’s beatification is due to a public outpouring of affection for John Paul. Well what is it? Is it the alleged miracles performed after his death that grants him sainthood, or the fact that the public will think of him as saint whether or not Benedict XVI declares him so to be?

And of course the issue of faith once again rears it unwieldy head and demands “How can you judge the faith of the faithful?” Well, I’m not. I am merely pointing out what, to me, seems, well, suspect. There is no other way to put it. The cards are all tipped in favor of beatification, even though the soon to be saint presided over two decades of priestly molestation of minors and managed to turn a blind eye toward his deviant minions until he saw the prospect of sainthood sailing past his window and decided, too late, that maybe there was something to this nagging little problem after all.

My brother ran away from home

My brother ran away from home. Unlike most who do that sort of thing, though, he waited until he had passed the half century mark to make his escape. We have a vague idea that he is on the west coast somewhere. Washington state presumably. Letters, notes, general queries and pleas concerning his well being were initially answered, if curtly, but are not anymore. Letters sent are not returned. So he either gets them, reads them, and doesn’t respond ( or maybe he doesn’t read them at all, maybe he just recognizes the return addresses and tosses them in the trash like junk mail) or somebody else at that address does something similar, if for different reasons.

We don’t really know why he left, except that, or so it seems to me, from the end of high school onward he seemed to have lost any enjoyment he might ever have known of living.

We hope that by leaving he has managed somehow to reinvent himself to the extent that he has rediscovered some enjoyment in life or has at least deluded himself into believing he has rediscovered that enjoyment.

We of course hope he returns someday. I personally hope he returns happy, or at the very least content. But I would be happy to see him no matter his condition.

But maybe, and this could be a good thing, for him, sad for us, he’s happy where he is and never plans to return.