A personal manifesto
We were in the car, driving to the restaurant, and talking about the election. Talking, not arguing, discussing how the nation might move ahead.
Obviously no one but us would care about our opinions, but we continued our analysis anyway.
You do get the idea that because you have lived a relatively long time, you have some experience to bring to such questions — or not, as it turned out.
A song came on the radio. It was an old song, “Venus” by Frankie Avalon, pure ‘50s or in the parlance of radio talk, a Golden Oldie.
We both stopped talking. We sang along, “Venus, if you will, please send a little girl for me to thrill, a girl who wants my kisses and my arms, a girl with all the charms of you.”
Well, it was not great poetry or even a great sentiment, but it had other values.
“How old were we when that was popular?”
We speculated on our mid to late teens. I checked on Goggle later and it was later, 1963 to be specific when we were out of our teens.
She sat back, folded her arms.
“You know, I feel so, I don’t know, at home when I hear songs like that, songs that I remember from a time when I felt that I fit in, I belonged,” she said.
“You don’t feel that way now?” I asked.
“Not very often,” shaking her head she continued. “I did all the right things. I went to school, I studied, I found the job I wanted, got married had children, did all the things that mothers do but when I came out the other end of this I felt like I had landed on another planet. My competencies were outmoded, anachronistic, useless,” she emphasized with a big lean forward, “and I don’t mean just teenage contempt either. Somehow while I was living life, the world changed.”
We sat silently, pondering or something, as I drove on which was some kind of record in the silence department for marathon gabbers like us.
“Well, I know what you mean. I guess I haven’t felt like I was ‘home’ as you put it or that I fit in since the late 80s,” I said.
As I thought about this, it dawned on me that it wasn’t any one moment, but a slow, accumulative series of changes that left me further out of the loop. Some of it had to do with technology, some was just because of aging.
I thought about this. When I was in my 30s I took a leave of absence from my job to go back to school and when I returned everything was different: the people the procedures, everything. And while I was trying to catch up, everything kept changing based on the changes that I hadn’t come to grips with yet. It was like swimming against the current.
I’m not talking about things like skate keys or using the word dungarees, but things like how you relate to people, what is considered appropriate apparel, how you do research — the card catalog is a distant memory.
I turned to her for a moment.
“Do you remember something called the vertical file where the library kept ephemera?”
Anyway, I thought that I was prepared, too. I might as well have been learning to churn butter.
I hear a song like “Venus,” or find an old “Thin Man” movie or watch a rerun of Mary Tyler Moore or Bob Newhart and I feel …what are the words? Fitting in? Whole?
And then I listen to famous people talk easily about behaviors that we considered immoral as if they were perfectly normal and I don’t fit in.
I hear salty language spoken by teens and business people and people running for public office as a kind of space filler, an all-purpose modifier and. I don’t fit in.
I cook meals that we’ve all enjoyed and find that a good portion of the people to whom I would feed them would not eat them because of one ingredient or another that has fallen out of favor. I don’t fit in.
My children played outside for hours without direct supervision. I certainly don’t fit in a time when people have to arrange something called a “play date” for their kids.
I believe in knowing the difference between value and cost and preferring to emphasize the first.
I definitely don’t fit in.
“You know,” I added, “the last time I felt in sync was sometime in the 90’s when I was helping the soccer coach plan a celebration dinner for the team. I can remember feeling a part of what was going on. Strange, since I never played soccer. but I noticed something that I hadn’t felt in years, something good.”
We elected to start our late lunch with a glass of wine.
After the wine, a great meal and evil dessert, we continued our car-based analysis of culture change and being left behind. You know, kind of like those we hear about on TV who live in depressed areas where towns have closed up and people moved away to find jobs that no longer exist. Well, it wasn’t that bad, but analogous.
Emboldened by a second glass of wine, we made our stand against a world that seemed to marginalize us and our values. And here is our manifesto:
We will dress as we feel appropriate while not condemning the obvious poor taste of others. We will not use profane language unless it’s really deserving. We will continue to cook meals that we love but we will also explore the rich otherness of new cuisines. If someone is allergic or intolerant of those meals, that is their problem, not ours. We will continue to learn how to navigate new technology — my friend exclaiming her recent acquisition of a tutorial on Excel spread sheets, but we will still keep a handwritten calendar of appointments and celebrate our well-earned Palmer method handwriting. We will treasure and support our friends, neighbors and relatives but we will also treasure who we are and what we believe equally. This is not a zero sum life.
We will not apologize for our moral sensibilities, nor forget what good manners were and remain. So there!
