I was talking on my iPhone with my friend for, shit, like almost 30 years about her vacation. She and her family (mother, brothers, sister-in-law, bunch of kids) met at a cabin in the Catskills for a little family R&R that severely limited technology. At first, she said, it was a little anxious. "We were just going to stare at each other."
But as they got used to not looking at a screen or texting in acronyms...they got more comfortable with the thought of "reading a book, building a fire and looking at it." She said she got a bit romantic and weepy at the fact that she used to live that way.
It struck a chord.
So did I. I used to live that way.
This is not a "get off my lawn" rant about the days of old which also included horrible treatment and rhetoric of blacks, Hispanics, women, LGBTQA...oh wait...that is still a thing. It's not to put down any generation (well maybe the Baby Boomers. It's my parents generation and I'm kinda conditioned to be oppositional to them.)
No - this is purely a romantic rant about how I loved myself and my friends in the days of yore.
I wrote letters long hand. Multiple pages of handwritten letters to my friends. All over the country. All over the world. And they wrote me back. And you had the time to do it. And i think it was an act of love. Of showing empathy and sharing your truth by writing your friends letters. I get a little confused about being the push to be an authentic self because for so long I bared my souls in those letters. Not all of them were soulful or dramatic or anything. But they were my truth.
I made collages and wrote poems and crafted stories. Sometimes long-hand and sometimes on a Brother Word Processor. I still have a bunch of them in a storage container in my closet. Every now and then (usually when i'm moving homes) I will whip them out and think "this strange, curious, creative kid." And I feel a twinge of who i was at the time.
In college, I regularly studied at a Victorian house in Highland Park, NJ that was converted into a coffee shop. And not a Starbucks coffee shop. And pre-hipster. Like some former hippie who traveled through Europe in the 70's and 80's came into money and just opened up a place where people could go to have coffee, do poetry reads and trade/buy used books. Local art hung on the walls. Starbucks was a galaxy away. I would go there and drink a gallon of coffee and just write or study or goof off and chain smoke (vape this, poser! JK. Don't smoke. It's gross. I quit years ago but it was freaking hard. I miss smoking.) It's not there anymore. But it was exactly the place i needed for that time in my life.
Films. Cinema. I don't remember much about television during my late high school/college years. I watched some things but if felt periodic. It was pretty much "Friends" and "Seinfeld" and "Melrose Place." White people in metro cities. But films were where you went to see some diversity, some cool masters of craft. Stories that just blew your mind in how they were carefully crafted. Yes, there was Blockbuster Video and HBO where you could watch these films at home but to go to the movies to see a film was such a treat. I think about the Erik Theater in Princeton, the old General Cinemas in Somerset, NJ. And (I pray it still exists) the Montgomery Theater in NJ that played indie movies. Pulp Fiction, Bound, Lost Highway, Crooklyn, Shawshank, Dead Man Walking, Fargo. Freaking Fargo forever changed my life.
Strangers. You had to talk to them. To ask how for directions on how to get to the movie theater. Oh and you had to call the movie theater to get showtime information. Or you had to walk or drive to the store to buy the daily newspaper. And talk to a stranger who sold you the newspaper.
If you wanted to murder someone, you had to go to the library and understand how to navigate the Dewey Decimal system.
If you wanted to date someone outside of your immediate circle, you needed to figure out how to navigate the personal ads of your local newspaper or newspaper of choice and send actual letters to a PO Box to get connected to someone.
If you needed to talk to a friend urgently and you were not at home, you needed to talk to a stranger to break a dollar so you could phone them on a pay phone. If you made plans to meet a friend in Union Square on Sunday at 7pm you had to show up.
When you made plans to travel on a plane to meet your friend in Amsterdam, you better damn well have connected ahead of time to ensure you all knew the deal because your plane tickets used to arrive in the mail! You couldn't forward it.
Shit, the culture just traveled at a different pace. Bands, trends, fashion all cascaded around at a different pace. Television was the internet of it's day.
Today? We are humans. We adapt to change. But we have growing pains and all change is not good. Instantaneous is not always the answer for everything. Our gut reaction sometimes is wrong. Sometimes it is tied to that innate fight/flight response. We haven't figured through the mechanics of everything. Maybe I had a bad day and I wrote a long, inappropriate letter one night. The next morning, I could re-read it before I send. Today the ballgame is different and we will adapt. But I still miss these old days.
When your heart would flutter a bit when you went to you mailbox and saw a fat envelope from someone you loved. And you would make it a thing to go to your bed and put on a CD (or vinyl because you still had a record player and not for the purpose of being retro...because you had a hand-me-down record player) and rip open a letter from your friend. and you felt loved and you felt love. in a way that i don't feel today.
But maybe that solution lies with me. I can still pick up a pen.
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Love your neighbor. They are veterans, lesbians, gays, transgendered, bisexual, allies, questioning, black, hispanic, muslim, middle eastern, christian, atheists, autistic, bipolar, depressed, police officers, teachers, too highly paid, too underpaid, sick with cancer, people who say mean things because they are scared, racist, sexist, haven't worked things out yet, don't mean what they say but have other things going on, new mothers, new fathers, newly single, single parents, addicted, stressed, responsible, irresponsible, made a mistake on social media, immigrants, legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, democrats, republicans, gun owners, gun hoarders, gun regulation proponents, victims of gun violence, women who were sexually harassed, men who were sexually harassed, bullies, bullied, people who hate ice cream, people who love ice cream, born with Down Syndrome, can't get over the death of a child, lonely, in everybody's business, are lovely in person but tweet mean, have had a violent act committed against them, committed a violent act against someone, never left the state they live in, traveled the world, believe their religion triumphs over all and others, believes their religion is part of collective, can't escape the shadow of their father or mother, doesn't appreciate where there family came from.
It seems clear today: all lives don't matter. So we need to work on a few things. Like setting up a world where all of our selves, friends, family, and neighbors have an equal playing field regardless of the job they play or the "race" or "religion" or "gender" or "label" they assign to plays in how we treat each other.
Love my neighbor. I'm trying.
