I first encountered the idea of keeping up with trends when my parents were the third or fourth house on our block to own a television. Before that I was content to lie on my stomach before a huge console radio and listen to radio programs hosted by comedians or dramas such as The Shadow, which frightened me, until I told myself it was only voices springing from an appliance. I was forced to construct pictures in my head.
Then the television. I don't recall asking for one. But the TV did not magically appear because there was much ado about men climbing on the roof to install an antenna. I watched, hoping one might fall, and I would revive him to become the town's hero, just like on radio programs.
“Stop sitting in front of that TV,” my mother
once yelled. “Go outside and run around the house three times.”
Which I did, immediately coming back, sitting before the set, my mother standing at the ironing board, sighing.
That was the past. Today, my head spins while friends purchase all manner of trendy items and devices that appear seemingly out of nowhere. Should I be lugging around a water bottle as I see so many people do? Even at the gym, folks carry them, slurping between lifting weights, while water fountains are everywhere. Grocery shoppers place bottles in carts, apparently preparing for sudden grocery store droughts. Do jug carriers fear devastating dehydration?
I drive a 13-year-old car that probably amuses others as they whisk around me, especially the behemoth pickups that suck me behind them in their wind tunnels. I'm like a tricycle in a motor speedway. Should I spring for something larger, more current?
I see people staring at hand-held devices (miniature TVs?) that supposedly contain words for reading. Do such toys rob them of sitting in a room full of groaning shelves full of bound volumes I call books? Do they not receive the pleasure of stacking leaning towers of books on the floor, bleeding off onto couches and chairs, barely allowing foot paths for ingress and egress? Such places are life-affirming.
Lest you think me a Luddite, I write using a computer and for years have found it satisfying and efficient, thank you very much. Saves me untold dollars on pencils and pens.
And I stopped using a telephone land line years ago when I bought one of the first available cell phones, an ancient thing that gave up its ghost one morning, without warning. So I ventured into one of those phone stores, greeted by a young man who looked at my old phone, saying “Sir, I don't recognize this thing,” then speaking to me like I might have come over on the Mayflower.
I now possess a shiny new phone — ultramodern, the jerk told me — but having no notion how to operate the blasted thing. My son tutored me expertly into the whys and wherefores of such a device, so that now I can operate it on the same level as an entering kindergartner.
Oh, I don't keep up with many trends these days. But I do watch the smart TV my son set up for me. It went on the blink the other day. My son lives out of town, so I called a repair service. I said, “It may need a new picture tube.”
Silence.
“And what about a new antenna on the roof?” I asked.
“Sir,” he said. “I don't think I can help you.” And hung up.
Just can't get good help. A new trend these days?
Michael Pulley lives in Springfield. He can be reached at mpulley634@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Keeping up with the Jetsons | Opinion
