Where Have All The Voices Gone?
I can’t imagine my life without conversations. From the minute I wake up to the moment that I go to sleep I’m talking or listening to someone. On the phone, at work, on the train, even walking to work, there are always people to delightfully schmooze with.
My sweetest High School memories center around the talks that I had with my mom. She worked all week, came home late to make dinner, yet still sat up every night to discuss my very important life in extensive detail. I can’t understand how she stayed awake. I’m ashamed to say that when my own daughters would come to me after 10:00 at night to talk, if I wasn’t already asleep, I was on my way there and not at all ready to listen to their problems. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” was my late night mantra.
My dad was a great listener but he just wasn’t comfortable with a lot of talk. And boy could I talk. I’d see my friends all day at school but there was never enough time to get into the really good stuff. That’s what phones were for. That was back in the days before call waiting, when you couldn’t interrupt one call to take another, so you blissfully chatted on while whoever was desperately trying to reach you would listen to an exasperating busy signal.
Conversations with my friends would take hours and my parent’s friends complained that they could never get through to us. So when I became a senior my parents finally agreed to get me my own phone line. It was a red letter day when I could chat forever without worry. But still, the best part of the call was the moment when you picked up the phone having no idea who was on the other end, hoping that it was that cute boy from algebra, then hearing his voice say your name.
But conversations weren’t limited to the phone. I spent hours in Steve’s car, or on the subway, or a restaurant talking to him about everything. Listening to his voice, holding his hand, watching his reaction to my ideas—it was all part of the courtship ritual. When he went off to college his phone bills were astronomical. He paid dearly for the sound of my voice.
During the years when we were separated by an ocean and phone calls were prohibitively expensive, the monthly call that we would allow ourselves was an event that was longingly anticipated and then savored for weeks. Letters were fun but nothing could replace our voices.
I realized just how true that was when I lost Mark’s voice. His Texan drawl was as distinctive as his cowboy boots. When he died I couldn’t believe that I would never again hear him tell his corny jokes or sing, The Yellow Rose of Texas. His voice was a loss that I couldn’t bear.
I tell you all this because old-past-it person that I have become, I was alarmed when I read Linda Matchan’s Boston Globe article:
Almost everyone has a cellphone these days, yet increasingly, we use them to do everything but make calls……Recent data from Nielsen suggests Americans are heading in this direction. The average amount of time that people aged 18 to 24 spent talking on their mobile phones dropped by 17 percent between the second quarter of 2009 and the second quarter of 2010. Meanwhile, they sent 45 percent more text messages. The trend holds up for other age groups too. The amount of time that people aged 25 to 34 talked on their phones dropped by 6 percent, while they texted 35 percent more. Texting shot up at all ages, even for those over 65.
I thought I hated cell phones because listening to one-sided conversations was so infuriating, but now I’ve found a whole new reason to fear them as well. Thanks to these little bits of plastic a whole generation now views conversing with a person to be inefficient and annoying.
For young people, phone calls risk chance encounters. Texting eliminates that possibility. “You call people and you have to talk to their parents and go through that whole process, “said Kelsey Corrigan, 21, a writing student.
Oh my God (or I should say OMG!) You might actually risk talking to someone like a, gasp, parent! You might have to string together a few words and be polite and state your name and ask for the person you want to speak to. And if you know the parent you might have to engage in a bit of conversation. Another student, Sasha Prell, 20, said that his typical, though rare, phone conversation usually lasts under a minute, unless he’s talking to his family. “We usually just text. It’s very efficient.’’
Since when is conversation supposed to be efficient? It’s meant to be sloppy, messy, filled with emotion, excitement, discovery just like our lives. How can you fit life into abbreviations and emoticons?
Anna Jane Grossman, author of “Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us” claims that, “We are losing this form of conversation nobody particularly valued while it existed.’’
I would love to hear what that woman, along with anyone else who replaces human conversation with buttons, would say if they ever lost a human voice that they loved beyond written words. Suddenly those buttons would be very cold comfort indeed.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
New York, New York
New York, New York
I pride myself on being a born and bred New Yorker. I may have been living outside the city longer than inside, in fact I’ve lived elsewhere for over 30 years now, but things like attitude and accent creep up on me at unexpected times. We were in a restaurant perusing our menus with Lisa and Matt a few weeks ago when suddenly I heard myself ask, “What is everyone going to awedeh?” Three heads popped up, stared, then laughed. I blamed my semantic slip on being exhausted but I knew that wasn’t the real reason. You can take the New Yawker out of New Yawk but you can’t……..
My assistant, Lalitta, loves to impress people with the fact that I’m originally from the Big Apple. She’ll warn students who are giving her a hard time, “You better behave or Joan will get all Brooklyn up in your face!” I’m not even sure what that means but it seems to scare them. They think that I was one of the original Goodfellas.
This past week-end Steve and I met our friends Mike and Mary in Manhattan. Mary had only been there once before but since her mother had warned her that she would probably be raped and robbed the minute she set foot in the city, she didn’t enjoy her stay much. Mike had visited many times and had great memories that he wanted us all to enjoy. The last time we had visited was about ten years ago when Lisa and Mariel were kids. We were excited about returning but even more excited about seeing our friends again.
After driving down from Boston feeling like kids let out for summer vacation, we sat out on the hotel’s bar terrace trying to catch up. Our conversation pinged like a pinball ricocheting off each of us. Later, while walked to a restaurant for dinner, Mary yelled, “We’re in New York City, can you believe it?!” I didn’t. I kept looking up expecting to see the Hancock building on the skyline.
On Saturday we visited the Empire State Building as quintessential tourists. At 10:00 in the morning it was already packed with people from all over the world standing in a hundred lines including a security line (where our dangerous belts were removed and x-rayed) a line for tickets, a line for the first elevator, a line for the second elevator, a line for….I lose track. That was just for the 86th floor. If you wanted to go to the top you had to pay extra. If you wanted to skip a line, you had to pay extra, if you wanted to actually breathe, you had to pay extra. And if you wanted to buy a souvenir, including the ever popular gorilla poop, (don’t ask) you had to pay through the nose. New York, New York. But it was a clear day and the view was unbelievable and Mary was smiling. Mission accomplished.
Afterwards we walked along 5th Avenue, stopped at Rockefeller Center where despite the 70 degree temperature people were ice-skating, and visited Grand Central Station to gaze at the ceiling. We walked to Central Park where Steve and I used to spend our Sundays rowing on the lake and where we now felt lost. I yearned for the Boston Common. Everywhere there were pushing, shoving, loud crowds fighting for a piece of New York real-estate. The city was giving me a headache. Later on when I asked Steve how he had slept the night before, he told me that he hadn’t since he wasn’t used to the continuous night noise. That’s when I realized where my headache had come from. I wasn’t used to city night-noises either. Somewhere along my life I had turned into a suburbanite sleeper.
That night we headed off to see Jersey Boys which had us dancing in our seats till 10:00. Afterwards, out-of-town idiots that we were, we attempted to flag down a taxi back to our hotel. Catching a cab in Manhattan on a Saturday night is not for amateurs. We ended up walking back for another night of car horns, sirens, and jack hammers. My New York headache was getting worse.
The next day we took the subway to Battery Park. Steve and I had grown up riding dirty, gritty, graffiti-ed trains filled with nutty people. That day we sat in a pristine white-walled train adorned with bright, plastic covered posters, helpful subway maps and announcers clearly calling out the stops. We felt like we were strangers in a strange land no longer our home. But we loved riding the Staten Island ferry and the fact that Mike and Mary were having fun.
It was not the week-end I expected. I had my usual great time with our friends and loved getting away, but I never expected to feel like a fish out of water—Charles River water to be exact. I never thought I’d feel homesick for the Pru, the Green line, and the Boston Globe. Born and bred in Brooklyn, I was now an expatriate and it rankled. I was too old for New York, too set in my ways, too afraid of the rush and the crowds and the frenetic pace. So even though I may drift into a Brooklyn accent and reminisce about ice-skating in Prospect Park or having “two-franks-french” at Nathan’s in Coney Island, it’s all become smoke and mirrors. I’m a Boston girl now.
I pride myself on being a born and bred New Yorker. I may have been living outside the city longer than inside, in fact I’ve lived elsewhere for over 30 years now, but things like attitude and accent creep up on me at unexpected times. We were in a restaurant perusing our menus with Lisa and Matt a few weeks ago when suddenly I heard myself ask, “What is everyone going to awedeh?” Three heads popped up, stared, then laughed. I blamed my semantic slip on being exhausted but I knew that wasn’t the real reason. You can take the New Yawker out of New Yawk but you can’t……..
My assistant, Lalitta, loves to impress people with the fact that I’m originally from the Big Apple. She’ll warn students who are giving her a hard time, “You better behave or Joan will get all Brooklyn up in your face!” I’m not even sure what that means but it seems to scare them. They think that I was one of the original Goodfellas.
This past week-end Steve and I met our friends Mike and Mary in Manhattan. Mary had only been there once before but since her mother had warned her that she would probably be raped and robbed the minute she set foot in the city, she didn’t enjoy her stay much. Mike had visited many times and had great memories that he wanted us all to enjoy. The last time we had visited was about ten years ago when Lisa and Mariel were kids. We were excited about returning but even more excited about seeing our friends again.
After driving down from Boston feeling like kids let out for summer vacation, we sat out on the hotel’s bar terrace trying to catch up. Our conversation pinged like a pinball ricocheting off each of us. Later, while walked to a restaurant for dinner, Mary yelled, “We’re in New York City, can you believe it?!” I didn’t. I kept looking up expecting to see the Hancock building on the skyline.
On Saturday we visited the Empire State Building as quintessential tourists. At 10:00 in the morning it was already packed with people from all over the world standing in a hundred lines including a security line (where our dangerous belts were removed and x-rayed) a line for tickets, a line for the first elevator, a line for the second elevator, a line for….I lose track. That was just for the 86th floor. If you wanted to go to the top you had to pay extra. If you wanted to skip a line, you had to pay extra, if you wanted to actually breathe, you had to pay extra. And if you wanted to buy a souvenir, including the ever popular gorilla poop, (don’t ask) you had to pay through the nose. New York, New York. But it was a clear day and the view was unbelievable and Mary was smiling. Mission accomplished.
Afterwards we walked along 5th Avenue, stopped at Rockefeller Center where despite the 70 degree temperature people were ice-skating, and visited Grand Central Station to gaze at the ceiling. We walked to Central Park where Steve and I used to spend our Sundays rowing on the lake and where we now felt lost. I yearned for the Boston Common. Everywhere there were pushing, shoving, loud crowds fighting for a piece of New York real-estate. The city was giving me a headache. Later on when I asked Steve how he had slept the night before, he told me that he hadn’t since he wasn’t used to the continuous night noise. That’s when I realized where my headache had come from. I wasn’t used to city night-noises either. Somewhere along my life I had turned into a suburbanite sleeper.
That night we headed off to see Jersey Boys which had us dancing in our seats till 10:00. Afterwards, out-of-town idiots that we were, we attempted to flag down a taxi back to our hotel. Catching a cab in Manhattan on a Saturday night is not for amateurs. We ended up walking back for another night of car horns, sirens, and jack hammers. My New York headache was getting worse.
The next day we took the subway to Battery Park. Steve and I had grown up riding dirty, gritty, graffiti-ed trains filled with nutty people. That day we sat in a pristine white-walled train adorned with bright, plastic covered posters, helpful subway maps and announcers clearly calling out the stops. We felt like we were strangers in a strange land no longer our home. But we loved riding the Staten Island ferry and the fact that Mike and Mary were having fun.
It was not the week-end I expected. I had my usual great time with our friends and loved getting away, but I never expected to feel like a fish out of water—Charles River water to be exact. I never thought I’d feel homesick for the Pru, the Green line, and the Boston Globe. Born and bred in Brooklyn, I was now an expatriate and it rankled. I was too old for New York, too set in my ways, too afraid of the rush and the crowds and the frenetic pace. So even though I may drift into a Brooklyn accent and reminisce about ice-skating in Prospect Park or having “two-franks-french” at Nathan’s in Coney Island, it’s all become smoke and mirrors. I’m a Boston girl now.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Don't You Remember?
Don’t You Remember?
If one more person asks me that question I will be forced to do them an injury. It especially irks me when my children ask me that. We’ll be having a perfectly lovely conversation along the lines of, “Remember when we all went on safari?” and I’ll sit there with a silly smile plastered on my face and answer, “Uh, no I don’t.” Then they counter with, “But don’t you remember when the lion nibbled your toes?” It is at that point that my temper will get lost along with any sanity that I had left and I will scream, “That can’t possibly have happened, surely I would remember a lion eating my toes!” But apparently I don’t.
This is not the simple where-did-I-leave-my-glasses thing. I’ve misplaced entire chunks of my kids’ childhoods. The only memories that I have left are a result of photographs or videos. It used to be that I might not have remembered every detail but at least I would have a hazy recollection. But lately even that has gone, poof. I can’t dredge up anything, not a hint, not a clue, of what my family is talking about.
On the other hand there are times when I’m a winner in the memory game. On my way to work everyday I run into my friend Buddy. I’m really proud of myself for remembering Buddy’s name. The problem is that Buddy is a dog and I can’t recall his owner’s name (the guy I actually talk to) for the life of me. Yesterday I finally confessed that I had forgotten his name.
“It’s Seth,” he smiled at me. “But don’t worry, Buddy is the important one.” I really appreciate his understanding. After all Buddy is rather distinctive because he’s missing a leg whereas Seth, sweet as he is, is well, just a normal guy.
I keep hearing about this memory problem mostly from women. Is it because we juggle so much every day that we shed superfluous bits of information, like our addresses and phone numbers, along the way? Is it the stress level that we all carry along with our drivers’ licenses? Is it our hormones playing funny tricks on us? And just what was the point I was making again?
But it seems that there is hope for me. I keep reading about all kinds of exercises that will boost my memory even though I can never even remember where I put my IQ. And it’s not just the usual crossword puzzles and SODOKU suggestions, but other more innovative methods. According to Manning Rubin, a coauthor of, Keep Your Brain Alive, “You can improve your memory and the way your brain functions by regularly exercising each of your five senses.” So for all of you who are having the same problem, I’ll let you in on a few of these memory boosting tricks.
Get dressed with your eyes closed: Lay your clothes out the night before then put them on blindly in the A.M. If you blunt one of your senses the others work harder, which strengthens the brain,
And heightens the possibility that you will leave for work looking like an idiot. I see no mention of a mirror in this suggestion so I’m guessing that your brain grows exponentially with each guffaw that you hear from someone staring at you because you put on your bedspread instead of your dress.
Play lunch roulette: Swap brown bags with one of your co-workers. Breaking a routine by surprising your taste buds helps force the brain to trigger new nerve pathways, which keeps it healthy.
Since my co-workers tend to order lunch from places that specialize in fries, nachos and sour cream I would be trading memory enhancement for massive weight gain. I have to tell you, if I have the choice of having an amazing memory and being obese or losing my mind but looking gorgeous, vanity wins out. I’m willing to forget a lot for beauty.
Shop by heart: Fire up your brain cell activity by trying to remember your grocery list in your head instead of relying on a written list.
And I’ll basically come home with nothing but chocolate and ice-cream because the reason I’ve written things down is because I can’t remember anything to begin with you idiots! What about that can’t you understand?
Have a silent family dinner: Enforce a no talking while eating rule for one night. You’ll have to communicate your request for an extra roll in a visual way which will spark creativity.
Oh how the sparks will fly. I will point to a roll, my husband will roll his eyes, a gentle hint to let me know that I could do without the extra carbohydrates, and then I will creatively use my finger to let him know what I think of his editorializing about my weight. And then we will have a silent family dinner for the rest of the month.
Maybe I should just reconcile myself to the fact that I’m going to be saying, “No I don’t remember” to people for the rest of my life. After all it made my friend Mike happy when I forgot that I had lent him money. Who says that you have to remember everything? Who says that a phenomenal memory is so great? And just what was the question again? I can’t seem to remember.
If one more person asks me that question I will be forced to do them an injury. It especially irks me when my children ask me that. We’ll be having a perfectly lovely conversation along the lines of, “Remember when we all went on safari?” and I’ll sit there with a silly smile plastered on my face and answer, “Uh, no I don’t.” Then they counter with, “But don’t you remember when the lion nibbled your toes?” It is at that point that my temper will get lost along with any sanity that I had left and I will scream, “That can’t possibly have happened, surely I would remember a lion eating my toes!” But apparently I don’t.
This is not the simple where-did-I-leave-my-glasses thing. I’ve misplaced entire chunks of my kids’ childhoods. The only memories that I have left are a result of photographs or videos. It used to be that I might not have remembered every detail but at least I would have a hazy recollection. But lately even that has gone, poof. I can’t dredge up anything, not a hint, not a clue, of what my family is talking about.
On the other hand there are times when I’m a winner in the memory game. On my way to work everyday I run into my friend Buddy. I’m really proud of myself for remembering Buddy’s name. The problem is that Buddy is a dog and I can’t recall his owner’s name (the guy I actually talk to) for the life of me. Yesterday I finally confessed that I had forgotten his name.
“It’s Seth,” he smiled at me. “But don’t worry, Buddy is the important one.” I really appreciate his understanding. After all Buddy is rather distinctive because he’s missing a leg whereas Seth, sweet as he is, is well, just a normal guy.
I keep hearing about this memory problem mostly from women. Is it because we juggle so much every day that we shed superfluous bits of information, like our addresses and phone numbers, along the way? Is it the stress level that we all carry along with our drivers’ licenses? Is it our hormones playing funny tricks on us? And just what was the point I was making again?
But it seems that there is hope for me. I keep reading about all kinds of exercises that will boost my memory even though I can never even remember where I put my IQ. And it’s not just the usual crossword puzzles and SODOKU suggestions, but other more innovative methods. According to Manning Rubin, a coauthor of, Keep Your Brain Alive, “You can improve your memory and the way your brain functions by regularly exercising each of your five senses.” So for all of you who are having the same problem, I’ll let you in on a few of these memory boosting tricks.
Get dressed with your eyes closed: Lay your clothes out the night before then put them on blindly in the A.M. If you blunt one of your senses the others work harder, which strengthens the brain,
And heightens the possibility that you will leave for work looking like an idiot. I see no mention of a mirror in this suggestion so I’m guessing that your brain grows exponentially with each guffaw that you hear from someone staring at you because you put on your bedspread instead of your dress.
Play lunch roulette: Swap brown bags with one of your co-workers. Breaking a routine by surprising your taste buds helps force the brain to trigger new nerve pathways, which keeps it healthy.
Since my co-workers tend to order lunch from places that specialize in fries, nachos and sour cream I would be trading memory enhancement for massive weight gain. I have to tell you, if I have the choice of having an amazing memory and being obese or losing my mind but looking gorgeous, vanity wins out. I’m willing to forget a lot for beauty.
Shop by heart: Fire up your brain cell activity by trying to remember your grocery list in your head instead of relying on a written list.
And I’ll basically come home with nothing but chocolate and ice-cream because the reason I’ve written things down is because I can’t remember anything to begin with you idiots! What about that can’t you understand?
Have a silent family dinner: Enforce a no talking while eating rule for one night. You’ll have to communicate your request for an extra roll in a visual way which will spark creativity.
Oh how the sparks will fly. I will point to a roll, my husband will roll his eyes, a gentle hint to let me know that I could do without the extra carbohydrates, and then I will creatively use my finger to let him know what I think of his editorializing about my weight. And then we will have a silent family dinner for the rest of the month.
Maybe I should just reconcile myself to the fact that I’m going to be saying, “No I don’t remember” to people for the rest of my life. After all it made my friend Mike happy when I forgot that I had lent him money. Who says that you have to remember everything? Who says that a phenomenal memory is so great? And just what was the question again? I can’t seem to remember.
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