Good Morning.
We used to have highway speed limits of 55 mph. At the moment it's 65 on the beltway around my city and 80 on the interstate. Despite these generous postings, drivers zip around cars that get in their way and are all bunged up in vehicles with air-conditioning, automatic windows, adjustable, heated seats, cruise control, and buttons to pop the trunk and gas tank. This kind of stress, a polite term, didn't exist fifty years ago when everything had to be done by hand, even signaling a turn.
There's also the matter of the telephone. People used to be on a party line where they had to take turns making a call. Those
with a private line rang up their faraway friends and relatives on evenings and holidays when the long-distance rates were cheaper. Nobody complained. They just played by the rules and everything was okay. Not anymore. We have to babble
twenty-four hours a day and we do it in a restaurant, a movie theater, even a church, or we can text and we often do that
while operating a motor vehicle, munching on a burger, and trying to get a soda that is half ice back into the cup holder.
We don't iron anything anymore. We throw the sheets on the bed the minute they're out of the dryer and we buy clothes
in fabrics that don't need anything more than a dryer sheet that is supposed to smell like the fresh air that once wafted through items clipped to a line with clothes pins. We use place mats in materials like straw because tablecloths wrinkle up and we can't have that but we also can't wrestle with a huge length of damask on an ironing board,
We shop on-line rather than trudge through a mall, a venue that didn't even exist awhile back. We're also not interested in
braving the elements downtown so we can patronize family-owned businesses. Malls don't have family-owned businesses so
if we insist on buying from chains, we might as well park ourselves in front of a computer and plow through pages of merchandise, add things to an imaginary shopping cart, pay ridiculous shipping charges, and plug in a credit card with an interest rate that is six times the current rate to buy a house.
We don't sit at a desk or the dining table to pay the bills. We have automatic deductions and Bill Pay, and we don't even have to balance the checkbook. We can get a statement on-line at any hour of the day or night to make sure there's enough money to cover the stuff we don't pay for with a signature and a window envelope because it's too time-consuming and we'd rather watch cable news or mindless sitcoms. I have this weird feeling that people who watch public television probably still pay their bills the old-fashioned way, but of course they have to keep a supply of 50 cent stamps on hand. At last they don't have to lick them.
We eat funny. We're addicted to fast food, take out, pizza delivery, and that most wonderful of household appliances, the microwave. There's none of this shaping a meatloaf, mashing the potatoes, and peeling the carrots. Pie, once prepared almost as often as a pot of coffee, now comes in a box, puddings sit in little plastic cups and taste plastic for some reason, and designer ice cream, available only in pints, costs as much as the supermarket brand in a tub. That's another thing, this one-stop shopping in a building on two square blocks. We can load up the groceries, buy some flowers because who has time to grow them, pick up the prescriptions, grab Chinese in little containers, and get a flu shot. This means we don't have spend all that time going to a florist, the drug store, the House of Wong, or a clinic but eventually we end up in the hospital, go through a battery of x-rays, tests, and lab work, and cannot understand why the doctor has no idea what's wrong and finally recommends a therapist.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
Comments