Who's the Orangutan Now?

I've quoted the line, "Orangutans are suspicious of changes in their cages" from Paul Simon's At the Zoo a lot during my lifetime. Usually it's about someone who is fighting an inevitable and benevolent change.

But now I'm starting to use it to describe my own feelings about change.

When I was growing up, new ideas and products were always  better. "New and Improved" was slapped on the front of nearly everything in the grocery store. I thought the original stuff must have really sucked if it left so much room for improvement.

By inclination, I've always been a fan of change, even just to break the monotony. But as I look back at the time when I got serious about being a grownup - around age 30 - I've started questioning how many things we've changed really deserve the label "New and Improved."

Before deregulation, flying was expensive, but even the cheapest seats gave passengers enough knee room to be comfortable, and flight attendants served real food to all of the passengers for free. What's more, you could show up at the airport ten minutes before flight time, run to the gate and get on board your plane without having someone tackle you and check what you're packing in your undies.

In those pre-personal computer days I never had problems staying organized because I had an assistant who answered my phone, typed and proofread my letters and kept the files organized.

It was easier to keep equipment up to date because nothing doubled in speed or capacity every 18 to 24 months.

Food and drink were evolving, but still simpler: There were two kinds of wine: Red and white. You ordered red with beef, white with everything else. (There was also pink for those who were having a seafood appetizer and steak for an entree.)

The political atmosphere was comfortably similar to professional wrestling. Plenty of posturing and demagoguery at show time,  but after hours politicians on opposite sides of the aisle kicked back, and drank whiskey together while they figured out how to divvy up the tax dollars.

When a scandal or problem was reported in the newspapers or on television, most people were inclined to attack the problem rather than the people who discovered it.

And nut cases that called for the armed overthrow of the government were not called patriots.

Communications have been revolutionized. Mailed, handwritten letters have become vestigial relics of a past millennium.

Five years ago I first got an inkling of the sheer breadth of the change when I realized that day in-and-day out  my local assistant was carrying on a running cell phone text message conversation with her boyfriend. He was in New York, we were in a village in Eurasia, sharing the road with horse carts and wagons pulled by oxen.
I think that was when I realized I had fallen a step behind the technological curve, and started to question how badly I wanted to keep up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in turning back the clock. I love digital picture frames, paying my bills online, the clock that sets itself and projects the time and outside temperature on the ceiling of the bedroom, this year's flu vaccine and the little blue light I shine on my face early in the morning to keep me from getting suicidal.

However, I have never Twittered or signed up for MySpace. I enjoy  Facebook - but I worry that 25 word epigrams and "Likes" have decimated thoughtful email exchanges and even family phone calls.

And some technology just seems excessive. Fifteen years ago I bought a network file server with the largest hard drive I could afford. It held  financial and contributor databases for more than 50 political campaigns and had room for more. Last week I saw an advertisement for a portable hard drive with 2 million times as much storage capacity. Price? $98.

I sort of wanted to buy one, but - for the life of me - I could not think of what I would do with two thousand-billion bytes of storage space, except lose track of things.

I am profoundly amazed that not only do I not own an iPad, I can't think of anything I'd do with one that I can't do better on my laptop. Perhaps there's an app for that.

So as society continues to rock, roll and lurch forward, I have found myself settling into my age-appropriate role as ballast, questioning the new wisdom and hanging on to a few anachronisms.

After recent airplane/airport experiences I've decided that - unless there's absolutely no option - I will never fly again. Call me old fashioned, but I don't think anybody should grope my junk without at least springing for dinner and a movie.

Truth be known, I'd love to have a Kindle, but I'd feel like I was slapping the face of the nice woman who smiles at me every weekend when I walk into her bookstore.

I know that someday I'll own a small device that takes care of all of my communication, data and entertainment needs. I don't know what it will look like or how it will work, but I do know that I will purchase version 2.1 of the device at a year-end clearance sale.

Hello. My name is Stan M, and I am an orangutan.

Now You Hold the Gun

There's an old story I used to hear when I was growing up in the Ozarks, about a hillbilly that accosted a stranger walking along a narrow country road up in the hills. He pointed a rusty pistol at the man's face and said what hillbillies always say in these stories, "Hold it right there stranger."

Then he shoved a jug of moonshine into the stranger's hands and ordered him to take a drink. Half scared out of his wits, the stranger unstoppered the jug and took a mouthful. The instant the white lightning hit his throat, molten wax shot out of his ears, tears gushed out of his eyes and he felt his tastebuds trying to commit suicide.

"That's awful . . . worst thing I've ever tasted!" he gasped.

"Yeah, I know," said the hillbilly. "Now you hold the gun on me while I drink."


The problem is self-discipline. How the hell am I supposed to work on my novel when people leave pencils that need sharpening and books that need re-shelving around my keyboard? A prominent 19^th century author claimed that he'd ordered his housekeeper to lock him in his library every morning and refuse  to give him food or drink until he slipped a specified number of completed pages under the door.

In campaign season, which is damned near always these days, politicians have an essential task called "Dialing for Dollars." They sit in a comfortable room at a comfortable desk, put on a headset, go down a list of people who are able to give them substantial campaign contributions, and they dial and schmooze and beg for money.
Almost all of them hate doing it. I knew one elected official who said he would rather stand by a freeway exit with a cardboard sign and beg for change than make that first phone call of the day.  So to insure that they do what has to be done, political candidates - in effect - hire their own hillbilly to keep them at the desk until they finish their phone calls.

In civilian life, military style boot camps have become big business. In lieu of self-discipline, people fork over a sizable chunk of cash to have someone force them to exercise, eat right and get enough sleep.

In Young Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein is not behaving that outrageously when he makes his household promise  not to let him out of the monster's cell until he tamed the monster, "No matter how cruelly I may beg." Of course he starts begging as soon as the door is closed, ". . . it was a joke for God's sake . . ."

But, when push comes to duck and cover, politicians are in a class by themselves when it comes to the desire to avoid anything that might offend one of their supporters. Once when I was staffing a candidate on a campaign trip, she took me aside before a fundraising coffee sponsored by a rich but obnoxious supporter, and said, "Get me out of here in 20 minutes, no matter what is happening."

Twenty minutes to the second after we arrived, I gave her a nod and started wading through the crowd  as if I had received a message from God. She turned to the people she was talking with and say, "uh oh" and gestured toward me.

When I reached her she gave the people around her a look as she was about to be wrenched away from her closest friends. "Sorry," she told them."Sometimes my staff is just relentless."

I took her arm, smiling and apologizing, trying to look as if I had to get her to the mouth of a volcano to prevent a catastrophe of biblical proportions.

Thank you, smile, step, step,  she pulled loose and hugged an old guy who was wearing a really great suit. I leaned in, touched her elbow and whispered that the magma was burbling closer to the surface . . . she nodded and start moving again.

At the door she stopped and gave her apologies to the group and dispensed one more hug while I looked worried and glanced at my watch. She continued to smile and wave through the window of the car as we pulled away; then she turned to me and said, "What kept you? If I'd had to stay there two minutes longer, I would have set myself on fire!"

Okay, your turn to hold the gun on me.

About Time

Relativity is considered scientific fact now rather than theory. If you are traveling really, really fast, time will appear to move more slowly for you than for people remaining at your departure point. Your kid brother could graduate college, have a career, raise a family and retire to Sun City in the time it takes you to play a hand of gin rummy on your speeding space ship.

For those of us in the second half of our lives, relativity in the passage of time is obvious. I got a big dose of it during the holiday. I get to see my granddaughter about every two months. The effect is like a time lapse video where the camera records a few frames every minute, then it plays back at 30 frames per second so that a seed appears to germinate, grow, and blossom in just a few seconds.

In my eyes, Amelia has grown from a hairless, funny-shaped, pink bundle of cute into a walking, talking, curious little girl almost overnight.

But from her perspective, everything outside of her fast-changing mind and body moves at glacial pace. After all, a year is half of her life. It's just 1/60th of mine. During the time she's tripled in size, learned to walk, and use words, I've lost a few hairs and the lines on my face have deepened a smidge.

I remember once asking my own grandmother if she had always been old. When she told me no, that she'd started out pretty much like I did, I didn't believe her. I had never noticed her changing at all.

Now I am seeing things from the perspective she had. Sometimes the world seems to change as if I was living in that time-lapse video. And I find myself doing what television producers do during a live program - tracking the time remaining until master control takes over and fades to black.

Nothing in a live production ever goes exactly as planned - an interview runs long or short, a segment is cancelled at the last moment because of a technical problem, something unexpected preempts something that was planned - so the producer is constantly comparing how much time remains with how much content remains. Good material has to be dropped because there isn't enough time.

I've already used up more than half of my time on earth, and there are a lot of things I'd like to cram in before I fade to black.

Some options disappear sooner than others: How much longer will I physically be able to cross-country ski? How much longer will Amelia be content to sit on my lap and let me read her stories?

And some things I'd like to do would take too long. I always thought it would be fun to live in Chicago for a few years, in a neighborhood with a good bar and a softball team. Back timing . . . I've already slipped something else into that time slot.

I've also learned the hard way that even the best plans can fall apart, and it's a good idea to have something to back fall on. Stretching the TV show analogy: I still wake up some nights remembering the time I was the guest-host of a live, television show where - after I had been made up, installed in the host chair and attached to a microphone - I was informed that every scheduled guest had cancelled. An instant later I heard the theme music playing and a voice in my earpiece saying, "Live in 5-4-3-2 . . ." When plans fall through and you don't have other options, each passing minute dies a slow, agonizing death.

But finding creative ways to consume time becomes less of an issue as we see the time remaining in our lives shrinking. I have starting taking the expression "spending time" literally, and find myself less tolerant of people who waste it.

A couple of years ago I was traveling with a translator and a young project coordinator who, while being consummate professionals during working hours, consistently arrived fifteen minutes to a half-hour after the times they set to meet for meals or recreational trips.

After the third or fourth time it happened, I told them they were insulting me and I was angry. When they decided not to make the effort to be on time, they were telling me they thought my time had no value. And the fact that they knew I had much less time remaining in my life than they had made the insult event greater.

They were scrupulously on time for everything for the remainder of the trip.  But . . .

A few months later I had coffee with a trainer who had recently worked with the same project manager. She made a point of telling the story of how she had been very late for a project meeting one day, and the young manager had said something to her that made her feel really guilty. The manager told her that by her tardiness, she had told everyone who had to wait that she thought their time was worth less than hers.

I had arrived at the coffee shop ten minutes late. I felt awful.