After three weeks of leave, I could seriously use three more weeks of leave. How about three more years of leave. I go back to work next week and I am not ready. Today it took me four hours on the computer to futz around with things that should not have taken more than mere minutes. Am I too old for this?
I seriously put some thought into an intercom system for the front porch and side gate. We have been building our own gates since Hurricane Ike took our fences and the new gates have no handles. They are smooth and modern and I don't want to put big honking handles on the gates. The electric company has to get in the backyard to read the meter, but I often notice him or her in the neighborhood before he or she gets to the side yard. Our doorbell has always been difficult to hear from the back of the house so an intercom at the front door and the side gate would be really better. But I had second thoughts as I read my email friend's column at Slackjaw. We have never been formally introduced. I haven't taken the man's hand in friendship, but he is a terrific writer with an admirable sense of humor. He was writing about apartment buzzers in his latest column and I hadn't checked it before I went on line to look for intercoms.
I too would rather be left alone. But packages come to our house almost daily. Books from Amazon or small out of print stores or another attempt at a handbag that works for me comes via UPS. Our meter must be read. We have a glass "screen" door which keeps the dogs from darting into the yard over the delivery person but an intercom that I could hear would keep me from actually answering the door when I am not really expecting someone. I don't like to wake from a nap and hear the gardener in the backyard. I would rather he announce himself and asked to be allowed into the backyard. In our part of town, kick in burglaries are getting more common although driveway robberies are more common still. We simply don't answer the door if we aren't expecting someone. If I don't know the person on the other side of the peep hole, I don't unlock the door.
Caller ID for the door.
Speaking of being old enough to be left alone: I have a friend or I should say had a friend. I can't say that we will be speaking again. I did the childish thing and hung up the phone before I could say something else insulting to her. This person is very well educated. A writer. But she insists on telling me about how "incompetent" her household help is. She hires women who are seriously mentally ill to work for her because "they need the money." Yet she criticizes them to the point that I want to cry listening to her tell me how terrible they are. She then says things about their ethnicity and "hard-headedness." Her doctors and lawyers must be of a particular ethnicity or religion. If someone has an Irish name, they are drunks. She actually gives a damn about someone's country of origin. I mean, after a generation or two, aren't we just Americans? She refuses to learn any language that might facilitate her demands or make errands easier. She was shocked when another writer friend of hers told her she was a bigot. I told her she was a bigot. She said she wasn't because she wished no ill toward these groups. I told her she should think of people as individuals not stereotypical groups. She complains about poor people in emergency rooms using "our" resources. That the "Mexicans" are "taking over". She cares deeply about where people are born, what color their skin is. I told her that there were simply three expressions of racial types--Caucasians, Africans, and Asian-Pacific people and she went ballistic. It is simply beyond her that Native American Indians can be Siberians.
Every time I talk to her she gets on this topic. How poor her housekeepers are, how minorities are running the world, and how things used to be so much better.
If you are one of the tens of tens that actually read this blog then you know that my work concerns government, politics, and media. I have been paid to do all three. My friend started our last conversation with her usual nonsense and then got on the media. She said media used to be better than today's television reporters and how journalism departments require students to take philosophy. I said, no they don't and the pressure on today's journalist to make a paper or a news broadcast profitable was just as intense when Edward R. Murrow was on the air. She was horrified when I insisted that Dan Rather was a good guy from East Texas and no intellectual or scholarly training, that Peter Jennings didn't graduate from high school and his tour of the Middle East and his father's connections at the BBC were more helpful to him than a graduate degree in journalism. Which really teaches where a comma is placed, not what to ponder when reporting a news story. She kept telling me I was wrong.
I am not wrong. I don't have to listen to a bigot tell me I am wrong. I hung up the phone. She called back. I didn't answer the call. I just can't. I can't go through it anymore. I wasn't right about anything when I lived with my father. I don't need this nonsense on my own telephone. She can't accept that things were not any better in her day than they are now. Politicians were not great men then, they were human beings. Reporters made mistakes, networks were idiots then, too. Romantic notions of the past are for fascists. The world is more complicated than it appears to be and dumbing it down to bite sized chunks of digestible falsehoods doesn't make it any better.
It isn't as if I hadn't told her that I don't want to be corrected in law, government, and media. I have a terrific set of degrees from fine schools. I read a lot now. I don't tell her where to put the comma in her poetry. I have asked her not to ask me about politics and history if she doesn't want to hear complicated stories. She wants to make school children salute the flag every morning, I don't see how the Republic is going to collapse if they don't. I don't believe in compulsory patriotism, she doesn't see the harm in it because that is what they did every morning in Missouri.
I am disappointed because "educated people" means that we have open minds, not a dependency on the past, especially when that past was about conformity, uniformity, comfortable bigotry, and mindlessness. I can feel sorry for her, but I suppose I am as guilty as she is for not calling her back. But can I compromise my values to tolerate hers?
