THE OLD AND THE NEW

I  suppose that, like me, you have heard an “older” person say, “I don’t have one of those and don’t intend to.  I don’t even know how to turn one on, and don’t intend to learn.”  They may have been talking about a computer, a smart phone, and iPod or some other electronic gadget.

Yet, you can be sure they have in their house a television set, a telephone, a phonograph player (33rpm no doubt) and, possibly, a CD player.  All of these were new electronic gadgets in their day.  I can remember a few older relatives complaining back when I was a youth that they didn’t see any sense in having more than one telephone (the one in the hallway) in the house.  Mom later convinced them she could use an extension in the kitchen.  These same people were slow, even reluctant, to move from calling central to using a dial phone, and later, a push button phone.

Progress marches on and we’d better keep up or we will surely be left behind.  Our children and grandchildren are justified in thinking: You’re too old to understand.  Wait until you are younger.  For some of us do indeed act as if we are too old; our brains have solidified and we are incapable of learning anything more, which, of course, is absurd.  We are just being obstinate or lazy.

Not too many years ago, during our vagabond days in the Chuckwagon, my wife and I, along with others in a campground, lined up at the bank of pay phones waiting our turn to call home and check in with our family.  When we embraced the modern technology of cell phones, we avoided all the waiting in line.  Some people then said they didn’t understand cell phones and wouldn’t have one if you gave it to them.  Today, just about every senior citizen I know has a cell phone, usually two, one for the husband and one for the wife.  And increasingly, they are discovering what we learned at least ten years ago: we no longer need a land line in our house.  Since we travel a lot every year, it made little sense to have a land line back at the house that we seldom used.  Our cell phones went with us everywhere; friends and family and the doctor’s office, could call us anytime, anywhere.

Recently, my daughters, with the encouragement of one techo-savvy granddaughter, purchased for me an iPhone to replace my Blackberry phone.  It has many amazing features besides serving as a means by which I can place and receive telephone calls.  One of the more interesting is the face-to-face feature, the ability to talk with someone and see them at the same time.  A program called Skype allows you to do this on your computer, provided it has a web camera.  The iPhone has this built in with a front-facing camera that takes your picture as you talk and sends it to the person with whom you are talking – provided that person has the ability to receive such an image.

So what?  Well, for starters, that feature allowed my wife and me to talk face to face with our granddaughter, Leslie, who called from college the other evening to chat.  She was away from home for the first time and just needed to talk to and see a familiar face or two.  We had a very nice 20 minute conversation from our place in Colorado while she was in her dorm room in New York.  That’s special.

Equally special was the phone conversation, in face-to-face mode, with a high school friend who called recently.  We had not seen each other in over 10 years, but we had the opportunity to chat face to face while I was in Colorado and he was in Hong Kong, China.  He learned that I had a web cam and called to talk about our upcoming 60^th class reunion that he will be unable to attend.  I invited him to call again on the day of the reunion as I planned to have my computer and web cam set up so he could talk face to face with classmates at the reunion.  He promised to do so.  And I know of at least one other classmate who cannot make the reunion because of health reasons who plans to call that day as well.

Technology has always been a challenge for some, but we all get on board with the new gadgets sooner or later.  Some people, remember, resisted getting one of those new-fangled horseless carriages and now, we can’t live without our cars. 

Some of us would rather embrace our fears.  We will not let success keep us from failure, or in the case of developing technology, we will not let the opportunity to enjoy a bold new world keep us from wallowing in our self-imposed internment of ignorance.

SUMMER TRAVEL BLOG

Travel, they say, is broadening.  Well, when you spend 12-plus hours in a car driving across the country, travel certainly broadens your rear end.  We racked up over 600 miles our first day out and felt very “broad” by the end of the day.

Surely someone will ask why you were driving when air travel would be so much faster. The short answer is, I don’t fly.  I have a vertigo condition that makes air travel very uncomfortable.  That aside, we enjoy driving.  We see so much more when driving.  Driving across the country compared to flying is comparable to walking to work versus driving.  When you walk you see many things you never notice when whizzing by in a car.  Driving from New York to Colorado allows us to see places and visit people impossible in faster modes of travel.  Besides, we are in no hurry.

I spent a great deal of my life hurrying to get to work, to get a report in, to mow the lawn before a storm, or hurrying for something that often turned out to be not all that important.  I don’t hurry anymore.

Driving across Ohio we noticed that the state was cutting back on mowing right-of-ways by only mowing the first 10-12 feet and letting the rest grow to natural height.  This practice not only saves on mowing expenses but allows natural grasses and flowers to flourish along the roadways, helping reestablish these native floras.  It looked as if the state might have mowed higher along the right-of-way once last fall just to keep trees and shrubs in check.  Otherwise, only the area immediately adjacent to the roadway was kept regularly mowed.  Apparently the highway department in Ohio is capable of thinking outside the box.

Driving through several road-construction areas gave us insight to how well road construction engineers these days are at keeping traffic moving.  Yes, we had to slow down and, yes, there were some delays in a few areas, but by and large the construction zone was maintained in a manner that allowed an impressive flow of traffic – except for those who were rushing to work or easily annoyed.

It is easy and tempting at times to notice the angry or inconsiderate driver.  Just talk to anyone about driving conditions and they will invariably tell about some jerk they saw weaving through traffic, speeding way beyond the generally allowable 5-7 mph above the posted speed limit.  But if you sit in a car all day as we did you cannot help but marvel that there are so many cars speeding along at 60 to 75 miles per hour (depending on the state) with everyone staying in their designated lane.  In some areas you are separated from oncoming traffic – traveling just as fast as you – by only a double yellow line painted on the road surface.  And most of the time no one gets hurt.  Amazing!

We reached Omaha, Nebraska the second day, our intended destination.  My niece lives there and we wanted to visit with her and take in the Omaha Zoo, reportedly one of the better zoos in the nation.  My niece’s ex-husband works at the zoo and was able to get us free passes.  (See, I told her, he is good for something.)  There was just one problem.  Omaha was caught in part of that bubble of heat that was searing the mid-west.  The morning temperature quickly rose to 95 degrees, and that was before we even left to go to the zoo.  According to the TV weather person, the heat index started at 105 degrees and topped out at 110 degrees.

Many of the zoo exhibits are housed in air-conditioned buildings.  That was great.  The problem was that you had to go outside to get from one building to another, and we had my niece’s son, daughter-in-law, and two year old daughter with us.  In addition, my niece is in a wheelchair.  Hence, we did not move very quickly from building to building.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my niece and her family and knew that they would be going with us.  (It was good-ole dad, after all that furnished the tickets.)  I am just reporting that it was brutally hot and when we left an air-conditioned building to step outside, the change in temperature took you breath away.  All of us wanted to get to the next building as fast as possible.

We enjoyed our visit to the zoo, got to see some fantastic exhibits, and enjoyed going to dinner with everyone that evening when we could sit and visit over a cool margarita.

We continued our adventure the next day by scooting across a large chunk of Nebraska on I-80 to North Plate where we turned south to see if we could find Dancing Leaf.  This is billed as a cultural learning center on primitive Native American life.

Dancing Leaf is located near Wellfleet, Nebraska.  Wellfleet, I believe, has a population of 100 and is easy to miss.  Further, the sign for Dancing Leaf had been knocked down and we nearly drove my without stopping.  Fortunately, we saw a postal delivery car and got directions, and it is good that we did.  The stop-over was well worth our time.  Les Hosick took us through a 90 minute presentation of early American life, including the time before people passed over the land bridge in Alaska to inhabit this land.  Nebraska, it turns out, was once under a shallow sea and the area around Wellfleet is famous for the quantity and quality of fossil plant and animal remains.

It turns out that much of what we think we know about the plains Indians, largely gleaned from movies, is incorrect.  Before the white man came with horses and metal implements, the plains Indians were more agricultural than we think.  The lived in generally fixed homes, much like the Iroquois of the Northeast, and raised crops, notably corn, squash and beans.  They hunted, for sure, but following the buffalo herds as often depicted in movies was out of the question before the introduction of horses to their way of life.  Meat in their diets came from deer, antelope, hares and other small animals.

It was a learning experience and Joyce and I both enjoyed the two hours or so we spent there.

The next day we made a dash for Denver where Joyce’s two brothers live.  When we crossed over the Mississippi from Illinois to Ohio our GPS showed the elevation as 603 feet.  By the time we got to Omaha the elevation was over 1200 feet.  Now, at Denver, we are over 5,000 feet.  We will hang out here for several days, visiting with family, before going on to our ranch west of Colorado Springs where the altitude is nearly 9,000 feet.  We have learned from experience that we do better if we let out bodies get acclimated to the altitude gradually.

Oh, by the way, the temperature this morning at Florissant, the nearest town to our place, was 55 degrees.  As I write this at 10:00 a.m. the temperature in Denver is 86 and it is 66 at Florissant.  I’m ready for some cool, dry weather!

WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE

Space is supposed to be the last frontier.  If we want to go “where no man has gone before” we must venture into outer space.  Space exploration, unfortunately, costs a great deal of money and a lot of advanced planning, especially if you want to return alive.  So, it is expensive and dangerous.  It is not for the poor or timid.

The oceans have been charted and most interior land masses have been explored or, at least, plotted through satellite imagery.  This might cause some young people to decide that there is nothing left for them to explore or discover.

They are wrong.

There is one place where no man has gone before that only they can discover.  It is their life.

John Grunsfeld, deputy director at the Space Telescope Science Institute, was quoted in an interview about the future of NASA directed space travel as saying, “NASA doesn’t have a story right now.”  And, he added, “Exploration is nothing if not the articulation of a great story.”

What can be more exciting than exploring, expressing, or articulating the story of our lives – and only we can give this story the excitement it deserves.

Each day and with each little step we take, we walk where truly no person has walked before.  No other person could.  We are unique and our lives are unique, uncharted territories waiting for us to discover them.

Adventure?  What can be more exciting than discovering your first love?  What can be more devastating than to have that person reject you?  The disappointment the Apollo 13 astronauts felt when they had to turn away from their expected landing on the moon and complete a race for their lives to return to earth was crushing, I am sure.  But their training helped them understand that through science and human perseverance they would prevail.  Nothing prepares us for the heartbreak of a breakup.  We have to struggle as hard as any explorer to work our way “back home,” back to a world where things make sense and where we can again look forward to tomorrow.

Discovery?  Our lives are one long expedition to discover what kind of parents we will make, what job we will have a year from now, how we will do in college, when will we finally feel comfortable driving a car, what is the dress code for the event we are going to, and so on.  So many choices, so many decisions.  Those choices and decision determine our lives.

We are assured by parents, teachers and friends that we are not alone.  Yet, we usually feel very much alone.  We are told, “I know how you feel,” but we suspect the speaker cannot possibly know how we feel.  We are slashing our way through a jungle of new ideas and new experiences that will eventually articulate the great story called our lives.  We are walking where no man has gone before.