Sometimes just a lyric can make you smile, in my case it takes me back to simpler time and a record player with a glass of lemonade.  Indeed – the words we wore….

Recently I found myself at an odd juxtaposition – I was in a judicial building.  Eighteen years before I had met a man who courted me with roses and cookies, and now I was looking at divorce court alone, because he hadn’t rose to the occasion to be there – maybe he forgot to refresh his cookies for the right date or just didn’t want to face the music.  As I looked out the window, a little sad at how life turned out, many hopes and dreams that never made it.  I also had to laugh at the court and court, because generations today, know only one definition of that word.  What about the old Mill stream? The lazy, spring time barbershop imagery, that has nothing to do with hair,  is now a way to see movies on a computer or get computerized packets of information.  Indeed, a stream by any other name…

Signing the documents needed, I was asked to put my information in the correct field – curious I only saw paper, where was that grass and rolling hills?  Maybe by the stream I surmised, and someone was being courted there as well, with lemonade and cookies.   I know that nothing ever stays the same, as the frog is delighted to tell you, have you seen a tadpole recently? Humor aside – seriously, have you seen a tadpole recently?    The simple pleasures, notes of music we once watched spinning before us, nature celebrating life with her creatures and landscapes, and being together, holding hands or putting playing cards in bike spokes to make the air a celebration  are gone – so is the Harmony, but since  no one takes a part  who needs the music (maybe take note here).

My granddaughter is not yet 3 but taps the screen of my phone to watch movies, and my grandson who is 5 believes if you see it on the computer screen the mailman delivers it the next day.  If you want it, it shall come….  It just won’t come back.

The way we talk, words that have meanings they never did, and just how we live, have in so many ways redefined the human race from its meek potato sack run of forty years ago  into an iron man triathlon of epic proportions.  I have packets of information now instead of ketchup from the Tasty Freeze, Carpel Tunnel from too much keyboard, instead of darkened car tunnels while listening to a keyboard medley cruising along on a week-end afternoon.  We can’t drive by to see someone anymore, because it would be gang related, and the only time we see one another get up from behind the computer is when the Internet is down.  The plasma we once depended on to see life, now lets life see us,  in a pixel resolutions from everything we are in contact with.  The world I will leave someday to my children has already left me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve acclimated well, and love technology, computers giving me knowledge at my fingertips and people and friends I would never have run into without facebook, where they are able to like me, even though some never did in person before.  There really is some good in all of this advancement,  but there was also good in red rover and dodge ball, skate keys and record players and listening to one another on the front steps.  Just because Life is a game, doesn’t mean we all need to play (it is a bored game after all for a reason).  Standing back now and then out of the picture (literally, without Photoshop), I see family just under the surface, almost waiting to be welcomed back on a commercial free Sunday evening with dinner – and just for the record, the gingerbread for dessert has nothing to do with an odd android device, just a plate some whipped cream and a sigh.

 

http://greatlakeschorus.org/merphant/barbershop/     give yourself a gift and go listen to life, there is a lot hear when you really make the effort

   I miss you buddy – my favorite critic who saw more with eyes going blind, heard life before it happened with hearing aids, and there will never be an “APP” to compare with the heart you loved with, before it just stopped beating.  You were the best I give you a 10 and know you would dance to it.