Tag Archives: culture

Raising the Space Bar

Photo-Jul-09-11-03-58-PMA couple of years ago, I had a debate with a colleague about a comment that I made. The comment was that “our generation” had arguably seen the most significant technological change of any generation in history. He disagreed, feeling that the industrial age had brought more. Whichever side of the debate you might fall on, my rationale was that my grandmother, when she was still alive, seemed to somehow experience an arresting of her ability to grasp technology more advanced than a land-line telephone.

When I was young (and hold on, because I’m about to date myself), my family had a “party line.” That is, we shared a telephone line with my grandmother. If she was using the phone from her home miles away, and we picked it up to make a call, we could hear her conversation, and knew we had to wait until the line was free.

I had my first mobile phone when I was college. It was one of those huge bag phones that went in your console and connected to an antenna on the exterior of your vehicle. 60 free minutes was a big deal then, and I’m still in the realm of ancient history for many of you. I remember my grandmother calling that number and being baffled by the concept of voicemail. I would have messages from her asking if I was there.

When I was very young, I typed DOS commands into a huge, clunky computer in my bedroom. Now, the phone that I carry in my pocket has more processing power than computers that rendered the original Star Wars films.

My point is that, more than an explosion of technology, people of my age have seen an exponential increase of information, and a fundamental change in how we access that information. We forget what it was like “back then.” The idea that we used to keep a hand-written address book for all of our contacts is foreign, the fact that I went through undergrad taking notebooks to class for note-taking bewildering.

Karen and I got rid of cable almost immediately after we married, because there were just too many other ways to watch what we wanted to watch. As such, our daughter has grown up her entire life with no idea of television being anything other than a streaming video service (she knows the difference between Netflix and Amazon). And, yes, I understand that her entire life has been five years, but this has still been her entire life. When we were setting up utilities for this new apartment, however, we got a good deal by agreeing to subscribe to cable also (poor cable providers, struggling so hard to keep an ancient business model alive). We agreed and, for fun, I connected the box, mostly to remember what it was like to watch something on a network’s schedule again.

While we were watching something together a few weekends ago, my daughter and I decided to get a snack during a commercial break. As we got up to go into the kitchen, she pressed the space bar on the computer keyboard to pause the program. It didn’t pause. She pressed it again. It didn’t pause. She gave a confused look.

My attempt to explain the concept of “live TV” to her failed in almost every way, as there is no reference point for her, no scaffolding upon which she can build the idea in her head. It’s amazing to me to think of the lightning-fast pace at which our concept of “normal” accelerates, of how easily we forget…forget in a way that my grandmother, I think, did not, because we forget even the foundation upon which is built our current state of “normal.”

I wonder what our daughter will consider normal when she is my age? I wonder how antiquated the idea of streaming episodes of her favorite programs on Netflix will seem then?

I wonder if that memory will even exist outside of an entry in an external storage device.

I wonder what we will have lost with all of that progress.

Reflections from a Sugar Bowl

A little over a year ago, I inadvertently created a Saturday morning tradition of making pancakes with our daughter. It has become something that she looks forward to eagerly each weekend, despite my zombie-like state (which doesn’t break until at least after my first cup of coffee) in which I attempt to assemble what is needed for such an endeavor in the kitchen. I am not a morning person, and I have no business making food. Yet, our daughter loves this time together. So, pancakes it is.

At some point in the last year, we acquired a kitchen cart…sort of a mobile counter space on wheels that can be positioned wherever you need the extra space while cooking. On my rare adventure into the kitchen, I find it extremely useful. As our move back to New England was abrupt, we’re apartment-dwellers again for a while, and this particular piece of furniture is being used for more storage than it had previously in its lower cabinets. The end result of this is that it rolls much more sluggishly. Its wheels also tend to grind to a halt as you’re pushing it, which can result in it tipping forward if you’re not careful.

“Not careful” being synonymous with “not nearly caffeinated enough to function.”

You see where this is going, right?

Just before the crash, there was this sort of slow-motion, surreal moment in which Karen screamed and I lurched forward in an attempt to catch at least one piece of the various items that flew from their now-unstable resting place. Miraculously, we only lost one as it burst into small shards upon contact with the floor. Sadly, it was a sugar bowl that had been given to Karen by my grandmother before her death.

There are times when you feel clumsy, and times when you feel much, much more self-deprecating. Sadness doesn’t quite describe the loss of this item, now irreplaceable.

After a moment of quiet, we attended to the business of sweeping the floor and making certain that small, sharp slivers were not left lying around for children to step on, and our daughter, in her uncertain but beautifully kind-hearted way, was trying to console Karen.

“Dont’worry, Mommy.” she stated matter-of-factly. “We can always get another one on Amazon.”

Besides being disturbed by the commonplace consumerism that is already edging its way into my daughter’s mind, I’m torn a bit here, because, while I want to impress upon her the concept of an irreplaceable, valuable object, I don’t want to encourage more materialism. We are, after all, trying to trim down the toy collection, not embrace a philosophy that would add to it. I want her to appreciate things that she will be given, that she will inherit, things that may serve to remind her of us when we’re gone, as that sugar bowl reminded us of my grandmother. Not the most poignant reminder, but it made a connection. I want her to do this, though, without idealizing the item itself. In short, I want to impress the differentiation between a sign and a symbol, which is likely a bit too ambitious for a five-year-old.

You can’t blame me for trying, though.

Earlier this year, while we still lived in North Carolina, we had the adventure of a weekend power outage caused by an ice storm. While we stayed with friends who had warm living rooms for two nights, I went back home to check in on things during the day.

Our daughter has a beta fish named Charlie (For the record, I thought it was a bad idea). We tried our best to wrap his tank in towels and insulate him against the cold, but on the second day of the house hovering in the low 40’s, Charlie succumbed to the temperature. I found him floating that morning. After discussing this with Karen, we decided that we were in no way prepared to have that conversation with our daughter. So, on our first night with restored power, after we had brought in our overnight bags and the kids were in bed, I went back out to a local pet store. With much searching and assistance from the kind (but slightly bemused) girl minding the store that evening, I located a red beta that looked almost identical to Charlie, and to which Karen and I jokingly referred as “Charlie Mark II.”

Our daughter never knew the difference, and I’m content with that.

As we settled into this new apartment which will be home for a few months, I fed Charlie one night while Karen and the kids were out of town. I talked to him just as I had the first beta named Charlie, and realized that I had just connected to two, that the replacement for that tiny little creature had merged with the original in my head as though it was nothing more than a replacement phone after you’ve dropped and cracked the glass on the first.

A tiny little life, so easily replaced by a simple drive to a place of retail.

And I suddenly wonder if I’ve any place to discuss the merits of a lost sugar bowl at all.

Grasping for Hope

Of the challenges that I’ve encountered during my life, being a parent is by far the most difficult.

I don’t mean for that to sound as though I’m some wise, ancient guru or something. Certainly I’m not, as anyone who knows me well will happily attest. Still, I have had some experience at life, and, relatively speaking, I haven’t encountered an experience as difficult as parenting.

I also am not writing from the perspective of the things that you generally think of when you think of parenting challenges. No, diapers, cuts and scrapes, temper tantrums, cleaning up after projectile…sickness…all are inherently challenging in their own right, but I’m referring to something more…well, more metaphysical than that.

There’s an angst, for me at least, that comes with knowing that there are two small human lives for which I am responsible. This is angst born of the desire to somehow protect them from harm, to keep away that which would do them wrong at all cost to myself, as impossible a goal as that is. As frustrated as I have always been at injustice in the world, I am doubly so now, because I find myself sometimes feeling an overwhelming guilt about bringing our children into a world in which there is a seemingly constant state of war or power-mongering or profit at someone else’s expense.

Of course, when either of my daughters smile at me and express a desire for my time, this all goes away, because I know that I can only do my best within my sphere of influence. Still, when the emotional onslaught makes its presence felt, it is a force to be reckoned with.

The reason that it is so overwhelming is because it is rooted, I think, in a feeling of hopelessness. I see violence and hate growing around us, and I feel that I have no ability to stop it, despite my intentionality of choosing to not engage in it. I know that both of my daughters will make poor decisions, likely decisions that will harm them at some level, in the future, and that I will be unable to prevent this, as well, as much as I would give anything to do so. A lack of hope is a dark place, indeed, and the smallest glimpse of hope in a dark situation is cause enough for the fiercest struggle.

Except, sometimes, the hope that I’m missing comes, seemingly, out of nowhere.

I was in a coffee shop a few days ago, waiting what in my Western mind was an unacceptably long time for my over-priced drink, and I watched an older couple come and go. They were traveling, is my guess…passing through as this particular Starbucks was right off a major Interstate. I watched them interacting with each other, their talking and their smiles, and my imagination began to weave a story around them. How had they met? How many children did they have? Where were those children now? What insurmountable odds had they faced at various points in their life together?

Certainly they’ve seen more than I have, and overcome more than I could imagine simply by virtue of their age. I wonder what pain and grievous moments might have interrupted their joy at being parents, either by decisions made or by the actions of outside forces over which they had no control. I wondered when they had felt powerless, as I sometimes do.

And I concluded that, whatever their story, whenever and however these events had occurred, that they were here now, enjoying time together, having made it through whatever challenges they had faced.

And there, in my imaginative wandering, was the hope for which I sometimes find myself grasping. They made it through.

And we will, too.

Not without scars, of course. Life gives us those regardless of our best efforts, but it is by those scars that we learn.

I don’t know those people, their names, or their stories. I very likely will never see them again. We do have friends, however, in the same position, friends who have been through more life than we have, and that, with only their presence, give the same hope.

I wonder if, one day, someone will see Karen and I in a Starbucks (that part, at least, is very likely) and think these thoughts. Because I know that we will have made it. I know that our children will have made it, that, in the end, everything will be okay. Not because things around us got better, but because life is created to survive, and because Light is created to overwhelm the darkness.

If we’re open to it, the hope will find us. Sometimes we have to force ourselves to be receptive to it, and that’s okay. That’s a spiritual discipline in itself. When revealed, though, the smallest hope will always bring us through the most crushing of obstacles.

Hope, by definition, will always point us to faith.

And hope is always, always more powerful than hate.

Always.

On Faith and Politics

“When the church aligns itself politically, it gives priority to the compromises and temporal successes of the political world rather than its rightful Christian confession of eternal truth. And when the church gives up its rightful place as the conscience of the culture, the consequences for society can be horrific.”

-Chuck Colson