A Tale of Two Eras

On this lovely, lazy Saturday evening, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is on the television. I have settled my 50-something body into a comfy chair in my 83-year-old house to watch a 1937 movie with my daughter - 2010 style.

She's sitting in her own house on her own sofa a mile away and we're enjoying the movie together via text message.

"Oh my gosh, the singing is soooo 1930s," I tap into the ether.

"I know!" comes the reply. "And the graphics. Or maybe then it was just called animation."

Indeed. It's difficult to watch this, the first full-length cel-animated color feature movie ever (something I know because I could look it up on Wikipedia from my iPhone) without noticing how much charm and rich detail has been lost in surrendering the painstaking hand of the artist to the efficiency of the computer.

"When we grew up everyone focused on the fairy-tale ending - either saying 'pooh pooh I don't need a prince,' or 'I want a knight in shining armor,' says the next message on the little iPhone screen I hold in my hand, while Otis the dog snores beside me.

"But no one focuses on how sweet and good Snow White is to emulate, or you could be ugly and jealous like the queen. A much better lesson learned, if you ask me."

Interesting point.

"Makes me want to see Bambi, even though it makes me cry," comes her next message, as Snow White makes her way through the forest and encounters woodland creatures that look a lot like characters in that 1942 tear-jerker. Although for my money, nothing draws out the hankies like the scene of Mrs. Jumbo caressing her baby elephant through the bars of lock-up in Dumbo, circa 1941. Both dates drawn from another quick Wiki check.

"They'd never get away with naming a mute character Dopey today," I observe. There is something to be said for progress.

The ending, of course, is preposterous. Felled by the poison apple, Snow White sleeps as snowflakes turn to spring blossoms, awakening only when the visiting prince plants a kiss on her lips. She opens her eyes, stretches, steps out of her glass coffin, hops on the Prince's horse and heads off to happily-ever-after.

No matter that she's had nothing to eat or drink for months. No muscle atrophy. No bedsores. No need for a quick trip to the bathroom or a tooth-brushing. And no idea whatever what this fellow is actually like. Today, we'd suspect he's an internet stalker.

"Good thing it ends here before they both get fat and grouchy," I type.

"You should see the shortened version of the children's book. There they never even met before he came upon her and kissed/fell in love/married," she responds. Fairy-tale meets E-Harmony.

Thus a thoroughly enjoyable 90 minutes with my daughter comes to conclusion.

Not a word spoken, nowhere near each other physically, but comfortably close.

The best of both the old and the new.

Disruptions

For the last 3 1/2 years, my morning routine has been the same. Up at 5 a.m. Take dog out for a quick pee. Feed the cat. Off to the gym for an hour of torture. Then the reward: a stop on the way back home at the neighborhood coffee shop for a lovely hot latte.

But as of Monday, my routine will be disrupted, because my coffee shop is closing.

It's not a surprise, really. The proprietor and her barista son operated it on their own, offering really good coffee and delectable treats baked fresh every morning. It's a labor-intensive endeavor, and even at $3.50 a latte and $2 a muffin, it would be tough to generate the volume to make the numbers work. Which apparently they didn't.

It's hard to watch someone's dream dismantle, and their routines are clearly far more disrupted than mine.

But still.

I'll miss more than the latte. I'll miss the fact that I never needed to remember "tall skinny grande" whatever. All I had to do was show up and my order was placed. No thinking required.

I'll miss the fellow coffee shop congregants, about whom I know both very little and a whole lot. Jeannie, who has a bulldog named Louie, a husband named Randy, a mother with health issues and a left-of-center take on political issues. Eric, principal of an elementary school, and his wife, Marie, who likes her bagel with cream cheese. Susie, who walks for 45 minutes before her daily caffeine fix. Philomena from Ireland.

I don't even know the last names of any of these people but I know intimate details of their lives from the pre-dawn snippets they share as they, too, have made this place part of their daily routines.

Mostly I'll miss the fact that I could count on all of this to be there every day to anchor my morning.

All the coffee shop patrons were there today, the final day of operation, getting one last brew and freshly baked scone or cinnamon roll. Bidding farewell not just to the coffee shop owner and her son, but also to the fleeting yet intimate relationships they, too, have formed over their daily ritual.

How attached we get to people and things that play even a small, but daily, supporting role in our lives. And how disquieting it is when something beyond our control upsets the routine we have come to depend on.

There are other coffee shops in the neighborhood, none so convenient or (in my opinion) to my particular taste. But after awhile, I'll form a new routine, meet a new cast of characters and find comfort in something else I can count on. Until I can't.

Apparently, I'm Not Getting Better

So it's just after 6 a.m. I'm taking Otis for a walk, hoping to get a good 20 minutes in before the sidewalk gets hot enough to fry the soles of my shoes. Walking the dog is always a time to think about the day ahead, notice what's around me and enjoy the moment I'm living.

And what moment is that this morning?

"Hmmm," I say to myself, noticing the sun's not completely up yet, evidence that we're on the far side of the day-lengthening curve. "The days are getting shorter. I'd better start thinking about the theme of this year's Christmas letter."

Wait. This year's Christmas letter?

It's July. There's still 14+ hours of daylight. Today's heat index is predicted to top 100. It's 161 days until Christmas. A Christmas letter theme is not a pressing issue today.

Except to me, perpetually living in any time other than the moment and clearly making no discernable progress toward change.

Now, to be fair (I believe this is called rationalization) I give great thought to the theme of my annual Christmas letter. I know Christmas letters are generally the source of derision, as welcomed at the holidays as fruitcake. But I will not send a Christmas card without a personal note, and I don't have time to think up and hand-write personal notes to all those people. So several years ago I acquiesced to the photocopied personal note aka a Christmas letter.

But mine are not fruitcakes. My Christmas letters are illuminating. Funny on purpose. People eagerly await them. (More rationalization? No. That's delusional....)

Await they do, because I never get it out on time. Illuminating, not so much, but when you don't really have anything new to say from one year to the next, a clever theme is all that stands between my Christmas letter and the recycling bin. Thus, my intense focus on a theme.

Last year with all the hoo-rah about Twitter, I sought to showcase my social media savvy and served up my year in tweets. A Christmas Twetter is a hard act to follow, upping the ante for 2010.

Which is why at 6 a.m. on a sweltering morning in July I'm walking my dog, worrying about a Christmas letter that frankly, doesn't need to occur at all, much less be worried about today.

Otis is not the seize-the-moment force Mr. James is. But stopping to do his business, he did bring me back to the present, at which point I made a conscious choice to stop thinking about the Christmas letter, and pay attention to the pretty blue sky instead.

Besides, I'd already come up with my theme.

Seeking approval

One of my many faults is a bad case of self-doubt. In many cases, it's the penalty for being tuned in to what other people think and feel... a good thing in my job trying to communicate with others, not so good when I want to sell myself or my ideas and I over-empathize with whoever I think doesn't want to hear what I'm saying.

So this post from Seth Godin's blog is a kick in the pants for me. I share it here, with credit to him, in case you need a kick as well.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/06/validation-might-be-overrated.html

Relativity

Killing time last night I was flipping through the tv channels and happened upon an old episode of The Golden Girls.

The show has been in the news of late, with Rue McLanahan's death and Betty White's star turn on Saturday Night Live. So I put down the remote and watched for awhile.

I never was a regular viewer, but I do recall when the show was in its first run 20 years or so ago, the Girls seemed... well, old. Euphemistically "golden." Funny, sassy, but old.

So imagine my surprise when last night I found them to be quite a bit younger than I remember. Even, maybe, about my age... certainly not old.

Which proves the theory of relativity is really all about the perception of everything from the point of view of yourself....

What else have I been missing?

So I was reading a book last night, enjoying the crisp view of the text on the page thanks to my new eye (with the aid of one of multiple pairs of new reading glasses), looked down at my arm holding the book, and saw snakeskin.

What once -- some decades ago, apparently -- had been smooth and supple, now looked wrinkled and scaly. Like the arm of somebody's very elderly grandmother. Startled and distressed, I closed the left eye with its fine new cataract-free lens, and looked at my arm through the yet-untampered-with right.

Not exactly smooth and supple, but sure enough, no snakeskin, the wrinkles smoothed by the patina of time clouding the lens whose days are numbered.

As I explore the new world that has opened to me through the miracle of cataract surgery, I'm making all sorts of discoveries. I can actually read street signs. I see distinct leaves on trees, not just green blobs, and the petals on flowers. People's faces as they approach me. It's great.

I also see how much gray really is in my hair. The sad state of my neck. The bags and dark circles under my eyes. And snakeskin covering my arms and hands. I'm getting a view of myself as others have been seeing me.

That's less great, if you come from the ignorance-is-bliss school of self-awareness. And for me, valedictorian of the oh-my-god-if-I've-missed-this-what-else-is-wrong College of Worry, troubling indeed, but maybe also a kick in the pants.

I know that just because I can't see or experience things first-hand doesn't mean they don't exist. I accept that dogs hear sound frequencies I cannot detect. I believe it's cold at the south pole even though I've never been there. Anyone who believes in a higher power takes on faith all sorts of truths for which the knowledge is second-hand and the evidence circumstantial.

But my cataract surgery has brought more than flowers and dust formation into clear focus for me. It suggests that the clouded vision that allowed me to believe my hair doesn't show all that much gray, might extend to many other aspects of my relatively comfortable, complacent little life.

Because my clearer new vision will be not be worth much if I don't bring a clearer head into the equation.

The wisdom to know the difference

In the movie One True Thing, a Meryl Streep mother character advises the Renee Zellweger daughter, "It's so much easier to choose to love the things that you have, instead of always yearning for what you're missing."

I love that line. It expresses the essence of living in the moment, a goal toward which I continue to strive.

But what if the missing things you yearn for, you really could have? If what you have has slowly, steadily, imperceptibly eroded without your knowledge - and you could get it back?

As I type this, I am getting acquainted with a new lens inserted yesterday in my left eye, replacing the cataract-ridden model I was born with. The difference is astounding. Colors are vivid. The type on the computer screen is crisp and clear; I can read for the first time the words in the pastel colors youthful web art directors seem to fancy, clueless as to the audience they're turning away. (Or maybe a not-so-clueless geezer repellent - a topic for a different day....)

Through my right eye, I see my world as it was -- hazy, gauzy, yellowish-gray. Through my left, I see an entirely different place: vibrant and alive. Dirtier, too -- walking Otis this morning I saw more gunk on the sidewalk than seemed to be there yesterday. I'm getting up the nerve to go look at my kitchen counter....

The point being, my vision slipped away to yellow-gray slowly, silently, under my personal radar. What deficiency I noticed, I accepted as a penalty of having lived this long. I didn't exactly love the vision I had, and I did indeed yearn for what I was missing, but accepted what I had with appreciation for being able to see at all. I was more or less happily in Meryl Streep's acceptable moment.

Which in fact was not acceptable.

What else have I shrugged off and chosen to accept as it is, that could be better with a little effort (or in this case, a considerable sum of cash)?

What else has slipped away, little by little, without my consciousness, that I could sharpen back up?

Where's the line between appreciating the moment, and consciously working toward improvement?

I don't have an answer. But I'm not choosing to love the gauzy view from my right eye any more. Surgery to replace that lens will be scheduled at the first possible instant.

And now, about that kitchen counter....