A familiar sight, my grandchild absorbed in his ‘screens.’ Focused on a small rectangle of light and magic, absorbed in animated conflicts, he is cocooned within the world around him. Like a writer subsumed by his concentration, he startles and remonstrates if someone barges into the room with real-life presence and demands.
As I age, I can be present to my family, my grandkids, as happened recently on a trip to my childhood neighborhood. I would point out landmarks—a now empty lot where our house once stood, my grade school, my best buddy’s home, the ricotta store. Acting like a tour guide, I passed along footnotes on the passing scene. But all the time, I was running a movie behind my eyes, screening flashbacks and backstories. Us guys throwing snowballs from across the street at the O in Roman Cleanser sign still visible on the sidewall of Wajo’s grocery store and the spitting contests where I was the acknowledged champ…could clear four sidewalk squares with just the right booger. But I couldn’t stop to relay all that. Not in real time. I would be using up their lifetimes to relive mine. And they still wouldn’t be able to know it the way I did, the way I experienced that time and place.
And so, I startled over and over as we walked along whenever a child or grandchild broke into my throwback screen-time:
“So, how many corner stores were there on your way to school?”
“How come the school is closed?”
“Did you have Little League in those days?”
So, when I wonder if it’s healthy for a child to be so absorbed in computer games and social media, I have to realize that I can get lost in my own dramas, locked in my own memory vault. And if I can’t quite understand the appeal that screens have for my kids, I have to remind myself that not everything we experience and feel can cross the generation gap. And anyway, no one can experience what I went through. My story is my own and only the broadest outlines can be shared. Unless I were a very good story teller…and even then. As my wise father-in-law once said when asked to describe his experience as a sailor in WWII, “If you were there, I don’t have to tell you. If you weren’t, I don’t have the words.”
Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/
You’ve seen the lists on Facebook or some other online time-sucks. They are designed to tap into your nostalgia for the way things were when we were growing up. Live telephone operators, doctors selling cigarettes on TV, cursive writing, looking up things in an encyclopedia, milk delivery, phonebooks, payphones, drive-in movies, tie-dyed shirts, lava lamps and bell bottom jeans. The lists go on and on.
He studied her across the table as she read the menu. He knew what he wanted. His favorite, the spaghetti carbonara. She finally looked up, head canted, her sidelong glance asking, ‘What?’ to his intense stare. He shrugged. What could he say? They had just spent forty minutes at the bar waiting for the table. Like old times, she had her usual Negroni. Talk was easy. It had been thirty years since they had last connected. Much to fill in. At this point they were actually free between divorce for her and widowhood for him. The waiter took her order: saltimbocca, salad, Chianti.
You’re doing it right now. Maybe. You’re holding your smart phone and staring at the screen. Flipping through Instagram, Facebook, Words with Friends, Candy Crush, or YouTube videos. Or playing solitaire. Or texting your sister. Your kids, grandkids or friends keep telling you you’re hooked, but you deny it. You can put the phone down anytime you want. Just as soon as you watch one more video of the drunk guy trying to get on a horse.
I go to a sport-themed barber shop these days where all the haircutters are women. Can’t hardly find a lonely-hermit, old-timer still hanging his barber pole outside a run-down storefront. When I was a kid, it was a man’s world, a chance for a guy to read a fishing magazine, maybe josh with a buddy and hear a stale joke before ‘getting his ears lowered.’
As I write this, I am listening to piano music by Chopin— if the composer were asked, where this exquisitely beautiful music came from— he could not have answered. He didn’t go anywhere — except inside his own perfectly pitched brain.
