EAST MONTPELIER – Hagar and I drove into the big rotary at the foot of the Nahant Causeway, trying to judge the volume of traffic on a Sunday noon. The friendly voice of Siri spoke to me in her Irish accent from the dashboard: “At the roundabout, take the first exit onto the Lynnway. Then the second left onto Wave Street. Then right on Ocean and left on Atlantic Street.” As if to add Smell-O-Vision to the nautical directions, the wind off the beach carried the unmistakable aroma of low tide. We turned our faces west at Atlantic, our backs to the ocean, and our thoughts toward home.
Safe on Atlantic– two miles of stop-and-go past two-deckers, bodegas, tire and body shops, and liquor stores – I breathed, almost unconsciously, “Thank you, Siri.”
To my amazement, she chirped, “You’re welcome.”
Now, I don’t think I’m losing it yet, though I’m at the age where it grows ever more likely. And I don’t think I imagined Siri’s cheerful response. If it happened (and it did), it was but another step in my constant drive toward establishing friendly personal relationships with my familiar inanimate devices.
Whereas in days of yore it was common to speak to them: it was de rigueur, for example, for teamsters or, later, truck drivers, to possess vocabularies that would blister paint off buildings, nowadays we have to exercise some restraint in our address to them. The reason is simply that they don’t need us to feed or repair them after any affray; they can just stop or malfunction at any time and leave us in the lurch. So I’m polite to them.
After my wife died a few years ago, I found myself a solo act, with a little dog, in a suddenly quiet house. I watch television almost never, listen to radio only in the car, and get my news from newspapers, magazines, and the computer, which make very little noise. The silence can become oppressive. So I began talking to the objects I interact with frequently. And giving them names and characters.
During Philosophy 101 in college I browsed the various offerings. I liked Nietzsche and Kant, but liked better the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Mill. In recent years, however, I’ve felt that all the nattering over the nuances of the subjects is tiresome, and have slid into a sort of indoor animism. Indigenous people consider trees, rocks, and streams, among other things, to be animated, to have consciousness. So do I, but I add things like coffee makers, vehicles, and laundry machines. It makes life a lot livelier around here, and a lot less lonesome.
First thing in the morning, for example, after performing my ablutions, I let Kiki in from her morning inspection of our perimeter and extinguish the lamp of the night light in the hall, Mlle. Soleil de la Nuit, thanking her profusely in French (bright as she is, she’s never learned English). Then, entering the kitchen, I hail Henri-Pierre Café, my little coffee-brewing pal in his dedicated alcove. I fill his reservoir, load in a couple spoonfuls of coffee, and ask him, “Pret?” I fancy that he nods; I flip his toggle switch; he turns on a tiny green light; I exclaim, “Voila!” and turn my attention to the rest of breakfast, chatting cheerfully with the rest of the appliances and hurling imprecations at the end-to-end commercials on CNN.
Raised as a child in a pharmacy in a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Albany, N.Y. – German, Greek, Italian, Jewish, Dutch, and Finnish – I take naturally to the varied talents and interests of my mostly silent domestic companions, and am at some pains to honor them. My washer and dryer, bearing the name Maytag, are obviously German, so are named Hans and Franz, and are thus addressed in their native tongue, and, I might add, quite respectfully. The same goes for the single-cup coffee brewer, Max, a Keurig to whom I resort only occasionally. The dishwasher, who works less than once a week, is Hieronymus. You can guess his last name.
We all mog along together more or less uninterruptedly, treating each other gently. Out in the barn, resting for the winter, is Helga, a 25-year-old German roadster, to whom I made a promise when we met that I would treat her as gently as possible. Hagar is my all-weather, all-wheel-drive partner. He’s not horrible, like his namesake, but he’s quite the road warrior on our occasional forays into the beast of suburban Boston traffic. If I can charm Siri into talking to me more (and I’ve been told I’m not utterly without charm), Elon Musk can eat his heart out. I’ll have an Irish sweetheart who happens to be a car who’ll navigate us through the worst of whatever is ahead.
