Electronic technology -- friend and foe

A friend mentioned that her children had bought her a computer in 1995 but she has yet to turn it on.  She won’t touch it.  Computers are not for her.

People talk about aliens, immigrants and natives when it comes to the modern technological world.  My friend is an alien— an unfriendly alien, at that. 

Aliens have no use for computers, cell phones, and all the other social media and gadgets available.  They wouldn’t have these in the house for love or money. Too scary. Too risky.  Too difficult to learn.

Immigrants are people who did not grow up with electronic technology.  Digital is a second language to them.  They print out emails and file them in a manila folder. They phone friends to tell them about an interesting website.  They use cell phones, digital cameras, Facebook, Twitter, pagers, and the countless  other gadgets hesitatingly. They are always an add-on, not integral to their thinking,  mentioned one speaker. 

Then there are the natives who were born with a cell phone clutched in their little  hands. They are as comfortable with texting and twittering as with their own skin. They can program anything.  Diagnose any computer problem.  

However.....  Some in this category, I have observed,  hardly know how to write using cursive or  add a long column of figures without a calculator or make change when someone gives them $11.62 and the bill is $6.62.  

I place myself  in the immigrant  category, elated when something works well, in the depths of despair when  some electronic equipment won’t work, like this morning.  My printer gave up the ghost. I think. There’s a light but no action.  And I had just put in a new cartridge. Now what do I do?

 

As an immigrant  I get edgy when my children push me towards  a head-first encounter with another piece of new technology. I want to shout, “Haven’t I learned enough?  Why this? I can’t take it into the grave with me!” 

When some computer failure  happens I think of my  parents who were immigrants to Canada in 1923 from the Ukraine in Europe.  They spoke English as a second language, sometimes haltingly,  never quite comfortable with it.  At times they longed for the Old Country, for its more comfortable way of living, for old friends and foods. They probably felt uneasy when they first used a telephone or a flush toilet. I recall my father mentioning seeing peanut butter on the table on the ship across the Atlantic.  He thought it was mustard and put it on his meat.  

I prefer books made of paper, bound, lined up in rows on shelves. They are my friends. I like my photographs in albums, classified by time or family, or not at all – not in an hand-held gadget.  

I like letters in files so that I can find them in a hurry. I like my financial records in binders,  at my finger tips.  I like my bank statements in print so I can use them easily for income tax purposes.  

But my son tells me I can do all of this more quickly, more easily on my computer.  I’m from Missouri.  Show me.  Little  by little, I yield.  I groan when I play Words with Friends and my opponent comes up with a word I never heard of.  I learn I can make up words, test them, and if the WF lexicon accepts them, the points are mine.  But what are these strange combinations of letters my opponents use? No word I ever saw before-- QAT,  YIN, DI, QI, CRED. 

If I texted, what would I say to someone 50 to 100  times a day?  Who would that someone be? 

And even Facebook, that entity worshiped by thousands, perhaps millions, only occasionally yields more than trivia. Although I enjoy the pictures.  Why would I want to live my life in the open?  How do these people manage to have so much time on their hands?  

I wouldn’t want to return to only snail mail – the waiting for the postman day after day, hoping for a letter.  

But I know I will never be a native in  the electronic world.  So back to my printer problem.   Help!

"A loyal citizen of the hamburger world"

I read David Guterson’s Snow Falling On Cedars with great interest several years ago. It  is a gripping  novel about the American internment of Japanese citizens on the West Coast during World War II. 

Guterson’s  The Other is  about an outsider who refuses to become “a loyal citizen of the hamburger world.” He succeeds  but at great cost to himself. 

The novel begins with the narrator Neil Countryman and John William Barry in an unintentional  foot race. Both are aspiring runners.  John William wins, but from then on they are participants in the race of living.   

Neil comes from an ordinary blue-collar family and John William from an extremely wealthy family. His  mother has mental problems and his  father is absorbed by his business ventures. Dysfunctional describes his upbringing in a home where  wealth oozes out on both sides of the family.

The two boys become “blood” brothers by choice – stabbing their palms and vowing brotherhood.

High school finds them still close in many ways but parting company in others.

“Be a hypocrite, entertain yourself, make money and then die,” he tells his friend. He can find no meaning in such a life.

Neil continues his schooling. John William becomes an avid self-taught student  of gnosticism but begins a gradual withdrawal  from what he sees as the hypocrisy of the modern hamburger world. 

Years later John William’s father remembers him saying, “The stuff they teach you at school is just so they can own you.”  He refuses to be owned so withdraws from society into his own world. 

In his effort to divest himself of modern cultural accretions John William drops out of college,  gets rid of his trailer home, car, income,  conveniences like radio and TV, and withdraws more and more ending up in a cave isolated from everything except himself. 

Neil, now an English instructor, out of the goodness of his heart, backpacks food, medicine, clothing, toilet paper, and poetry to John William’s cave home where he lives as a hermit for seven years. He is lonely but unable to connect. 

He becomes sick, diseased, unstable mentally and succumbs when Neil is unable to bring in fresh supplies. In brief,  Neil finds his dead body, rolls it  up in a cedar blanket John William wove and leaves it  in the cave to be found decades later by a park ranger.

 “A light he was to no one but himself,” Neil quotes to his wife from a Robert Frost poem when he hears the news of his friend’s death.  

As I read The Other, it brought to mind parallels with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a staple of the drop-out generation of the sixties.  

 Fifteen-year-old Holden Caulfield, a high school dropout in Manhattan, like John William,  is disillusioned with the phony world in which adults are crazy about cars, “They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they’re always talking  about  how many miles they get to the gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that’s even newer. I don’t even like old cars.”

The  youthful Holden shares John William’s view about education: “ It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses ....”  

He would like to drop out of this phony world – into the woods, into a cave, or whatever. 

His counselor encourages him to stick with school.  An academic education will give him an idea “what size mind you have. What it’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t.” 

Fortunately, for Holden, he doesn’t end up in a cave, alone, emaciated, sick and out of his mind. He makes a small discovery about life. It has to do with his small sister Phoebe. He loves her.  He can’t leave her behind.  

He realizes that if kids want to reach for the gold ring on the merry-go-round, “you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.”

In Guterson’s novel John William refuses to grab for the gold ring. He refuses to risk loving.  His withdrawal from the society he despises is final.   

Years later Neil learns that his “blood brother”  left him his entire inheritance of millions of dollars. He made Neil a full-fledged citizen of the hamburger world.  Whether Neil will be bought or reach for the gold ring is up for grabs. 

Will this novel be the next Catcher in the Rye?  Both novels are intense indictments of the American “wasteland.” 

I don’t think The Other will have the popular  appeal of  Salinger’s Catcher because the language  is less accessible  to the ordinary reader. However, it challenges today’s hamburger world citizens to think through life-worthy values.  

Recording family stories -- the stuff of life

For decades I have put time and energy into encouraging others to write their family history. I have written two books about this topic:  Good Times with Old Times (out of print) and How to Write Your Personal or Family  History (Good Books). 

I  spoke at workshop again this weekend in the small community of Goessel, Kansas, at their historical museum.  I tell myself that I am too old for this, but then I do it again.  It inspires me when I find people wanting encouragement  in connecting with the past. The group that came together this weekend was small but interested, so we had a good time together. 

Help in writing a family history can be reduced to a few words.  Someone has said all you have to do is walk into your past, haul out what’s there, take a good look at it, sort it, organize it, and record it for posterity. 

I have collected this stuff of life for years. I think my interest started when I was still in high school, reading through a genealogy on my father’s side.  I noticed a small notation next to the name of a woman: “She was reported to be a witch.”  The German word was “hex.”  

A witch in the family? Surely she was a fictive character.  It took me about fifty years to find out who this woman was when I met a relative who had known her in the Ukraine as  a child. The witch had actually existed.  She had been a colorful personality in the conservative Mennonite colonies, wearing bright skirts, smoking, and telling fortunes with Tarot cards.  She could also foretell the future.   Several of my later stories mention her psychic powers. 

I started collecting stories like some people collect stamps or coins or salt and pepper shakers, or whatever.  I collected these stories in my head and then in files  long before I knew why  I was doing this or had begun encouraging others to collect theirs. These family stories fascinated me. 

I was fortunate to have siblings who had the same passion.  Many years ago one Sunday afternoon visiting together in Edmonton we began telling stories of our childhood.  They tumbled out one after another.  

Someone said, “These stories are too good to forget.”  Brother Jack offered to edit a collection of family stories if we would all submit our memories.  We did.  The result was  Growing Up in Blaine Lake by Five Who Did – a modest collection of  family stories but a treasure. 

We grew up with stories. They appeared in our lives in different settings.  Dad came home from the store at noon and told us stories he had heard during the morning business transactions. Mother and Dad told stories during long winter evenings in northern Saskatchewan as we all sat around the oilcloth-covered oak table under the  gas lamp. 

Story telling took place when relatives reminisced about ocean crossings, making watermelon syrup, dodging cannonballs on a hike across no-man’s land to visit a girl friend, and the best way to make Zwieback.

We children told stories, or rather, I should say my oldest sister, Frieda, did. She  gathered all five of us in the bed she and Annie shared.  Snuggled under the comforters on cold winter evenings she told us continuing stories night after night. 

We children told each other made-up stories when playing in the little shed we called the playhouse, making them suit our play. Stories were part of our daily sustenance but in a different form than the food Mother made.   

Several years ago I put together a collection of stories my father told us about his growing up in the Ukraine and then about  Blaine Lake, where we were living (Into the Twilight Zone: Family stories my  father and others told me too good to throw out).   I included the witch story. 

A point I tried to make in this recent workshop as I always do is that everyone has a story to tell, not just the rich and famous.  In many years of teaching family history writing classes, it doesn’t take long to discover that the stories are there, just not recorded or considered worthwhile. 

Judy Blunt writes in  her memoir Breaking Clean that the heart of stories lies in passing on what you  consider important.  By rethinking a story you learn what needs saying and what can be omitted, so each teller may focus on a different aspect of the same story. 

Stories are part of the legacy we elders leave our children and grandchildren.  Over the years I have sensed my greatest riches lie not in tangible things but in the insights and values  those who lived before me thought significant enough to tell in stories and which I am privileged to pass on.