EAST MONTPELIER – Most of us have always been told, and believe it, too, that for wisdom we should look to our elders. At my age, however, I’ve about run out of elders, and I don’t feel particularly wise, myself. But I’ve discovered something that’s changing my attitude: my kids are much better equipped to handle modern life than am I, and that if I’m feeling perplexed or frustrated about anything, I have but to mention it to find that they don’t even consider it a problem to be solved, except in my case.
I happened to mention in one of our twice-weekly phone calls (unimaginable in my day, when the limit was six minutes and the price noticeable) that my cable hookup, for internet and television, was now almost three hundred bucks. We know you are lively on the internet, they said, but how much TV do you watch? Very little; I watch the news when I’m cooking and eating on the little TV in the kitchen, which I really can’t see; I just listen and shout back at the over-and-over commercials for reverse mortgages, life insurance buyouts, car insurance, car repair insurance (why a millionaire like Ice-T is driving such a junker is beyond me) and my personal bête noire, Medicare Plus.
Besides the small set tucked away up in a kitchen cabinet, there are large sets in the bedroom, over the mantel, and in the rental downstairs, but I haven’t turned one on in I don’t know how long. The renter watches her choices of TV on her laptop, so all I need is a set (they call it a “smart set”) in the kitchen. The last weekend of the month they’re zooming in to wean me of my ruinously expensive habit, and I can afford cigars again (which I gave up over forty years ago).
All I have to do now, besides being eternally grateful for the improvements to my life wrought by my kids, is learn to move the hot spot around the crowded screen of the new TV in the kitchen to get the station I want. The greatest improvements already are that some channels go quiet (unsettling at first) when a commercial comes on, and that Wolf Blitzer rarely pops up thanking his guests very, very much. I’ll tell you: if God had lent Moses old Wolf during the parade of pestilences, the Hebrew children would have been set free much sooner.
So life gets simpler (and more affordable) item by item. Trouble is, life is a moving target, especially in senescence. Conveniences I’ll need in a very few years (an outdoor walker, for example) are solutions to problems that I can perceive on the horizon now, but there are others coming that I can’t (or refuse to) think about now.
Meanwhile, life beyond my yard seems to be getting more complicated, especially now that I can see the faces answering questions on the television. Lying has become so normal that I flat don’t believe anything I hear until I’ve checked it out with a credible source or two. The greatest growth business in America seems to be the legal profession. The president is currently in effect suing himself for millions of dollars. No one offers any help in understanding who’s paying more millions for all that counsel. But I have a sneaking suspicion who is.
Is it any wonder I retreat to my yard, where Nature seems unaware of the turmoil in the capital city, where men and women in air-conditioned living quarters, offices, meeting halls, automobiles, terminals, and trains and planes act as if they have some idea of the lives of the people they represent. Consider what we have to deal with: child care, because one income is no longer adequate; health care insurance, which folks are abandoning after a loss of subsidy; fuel prices, both heating oil and gasoline (a thousand-dollar heating oil delivery kind of gets your attention, and for people with a considerable commute, alternatives may become essential). It’s hard to believe that congresspersons, at $174.000 base pay, are as troubled as we by the cost of necessities. If the report can be credited, House Speaker Johnson just suggested that insider trading can help lawmakers struggling on that meager salary.
In the yard around the house, the deer visit as they have as long as I’ve been here, even with Kiki running at them fiercely, but stopping short of the tall grass. I hope that’s a conscious act; the grass is full of ticks. The brook below the kitchen bubbles cheerfully toward the Strait of Belle Isle. The little oaks are budding slowly, a bright cocoa. Somewhere beyond here, some chumps are working to impose our imperial strength on the world. The foot of the yard, by my old dog’s grave beneath the budding tamaracks, is about as important a place to me as any gold-decked ballroom.
