TheMommyBlog

Thursday, November 12, 2009 Me, Me, Me, Family

I spoke to my elderly aunt last evening—well, I left a couple messages and she asked a friend to call because it was too much effort for her—and I got to thinking about the people in my life, and all the people in every one of your lives too. Truth.

Ever since her stroke, my aunt has been reluctant to talk on the phone, and there are really only two family members in touch with her and I haven’t even met the other one. We’ve talked for forty years, extensively, laughed, learned, argued, everything you do with someone who is a significant influence in your life. Whenever we visited my dad in the summers in Ohio, we would always spend a couple of weeks in Connecticut with them. She and my uncle owned a small, artsy theater in the tiny town of Litchfield (it was tiny then, lemme tell you) where we saw Tommy and An Unmarried Woman, and Harold and Maude, all sorts of films we’d never have seen in our natural habitats. We sold candy and cleaned up after the movies, pocketing any change or other treasures that had fallen from visitor’s pockets. We thought we had the greatest gig in the world.

Each year, they took us to New York where we saw a Broadway play. We saw The Wiz—not the Michael Jackson debacle—the one with Miss Mills and all the great jazzy, bluesy characters. We saw Little Orphan Annie with Sarah Jessica Parker. Yes, we are the same age. We saw The King and I with Yul Brenner, and The Pirates of Penzance with Kevin Kline, Linda Ronstadt and Andy Gibb at the Theater in Central Park. Over the years, we wore the soundtrack LPs thin of all of those productions, and to this day I can still sing most of songs.

I’m going down this road to point up the fact that only several people have these memories, and there is no one to pass them to unless we tell them. My aunt was a terrific source of family lore, and when I took up genealogy she was right there with me, filling in blanks and asking for research. To this day she does not use a computer or have email.

And now, she will not come to the phone. She called just to say, “I can’t talk, I have so much to say, I will write you a letter.” And then a family friend filled me in on health details. She sold the car because there’s no chance she’s going to regain the ability to drive. She has a visiting nurse, and refuses to see visitors, even me. This is a woman who climbed trees with me and marched us all over her thirty acres looking for that one black walnut tree my uncle swore was out there.

We can’t wet-jack human beings. We can’t plug into their brains and download all this stuff, this wealth of memories. It used to be that we had letters and records, to be discovered in an attic or as part of an estate, and much could be pieced together from the scraps. Today, nearly everything is stored electronically, and since the dawn of email, the art of letter writing has gone straight down the drain. Nowadays we communicate in bits and bursts, not even well thought out at that, tiny thoughts or jokes or reminders that, pieced together, would give us no clue what a person’s life was like and how she lived. And if she used AOL, good fucking luck sifting past all those forwards only to find platitudes or Power Point files filled with photos of cute kittens.

In the same way, our present is suffering as extensively as our past. With everything going paperless and so much news and communication happening online, there is no way to track that shit down. You have to have the exact URL. And even then, pages get changed or disappear, and there is only so much the WayBack Machine/Internet Archive can do. Believe me, I’ve tried to piece together my first web sites. A lot of memories were recorded there, and were lost in the stampede of migration when blogging software was invented. We didn’t have a clue what we were doing, but it was modern, and fast, and earth-shatteringly important.

And I’m not just talking about our personal lives, the details of our days. I’m talking about bills, deeds, checks, medical records—the things that used to supply so much information but now are password-protected on some old Gateway computer with Windows 95 and AOL standing watch. How will we know about how WE migrated? How can we find anything about anyone without violating privacy? I have enough trouble finding my own stuff; forget looking for anything pertaining to someone else.

It used to be that when one was successful, it was tangible, visible to all, in your home, your acreage, your stature in a community where everyone knew everyone else. When you suffered setbacks, or lost all you had, it was tangible in the empty canning jars in winter, the too-dry fields, the flour bin that no longer emitted a puff when you opened it. You knew when you were running out of food, out of cash, out of time.

Today, you can cruise through your life fooling yourself into thinking that because you still have a home, a car, electricity and cable, you are making it. The bad credit reports, the collections, the unpaid bills…all of that is invisible to the outside world—not that you live in a community where everyone knows each other anymore—and sometimes it is invisible to us.

I look around my home, at my children, and at myself, and can almost believe that everything is okay. It’s only when I happen to screen calls poorly and pick up for a collection agency, or when my bank calls to offer me some new service or coverage, especially for loyal customers, that I am jolted back into reality.

Today, when my bank called to praise my loyalty and long standing with their fine institution, and offered some fabulous for-esteemed-members-only program, I said, “Isn’t this the same bank, that ran a now-routine credit check in an effort to minimize risk and stop hemorrhaging bad debt, raised all my rates to thirty percent, then lowered all of my credit limits to the hundreds, and then canceled them completely? Didn’t I used to have stellar credit with you until I lost my job and stopped receiving child support and then unemployment payments? And as soon as I couldn’t keep up with one, maybe three, payments, you cut me off at the knees? I used to have twenty grand in credit just sitting there, my safety net, to be used in catastrophic emergencies. Now you’ve canceled or crippled all of those emergency accounts, even though all but one had ZERO BALANCES on them and perfect payment records? Are you still with me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So as an underemployed, uninsured, divorced, sole-support mom of three, I cannot fathom giving you one penny for a program I don’t need—no, don’t tell me that it’s free for thirty days, I know that I will have to be the one to remember to cancel it a month from now, because you sure won’t remind me as it’s a cash cow for you with all the suckers grabbing that free trial—I won’t engage in any further commerce with your bank despite having been a customer for twenty years. All that time I trusted you with my living, my future, my safety nets, and as soon as you saw an opening you dropped me like a steaming turd. So, no thank you.”

“Okay, ma’am, I’ll put a note in the record, and… you have a nice day.”

Sure. Soon I’ll be sufficiently distracted by the pull of my writing, my children, my email, and the evening’s chores to forget for a while that I’ve already been pulled down by invisible wolves, along with countless others.

And we won’t have a clue who the others are, because we don’t live in a community where everyone knows everyone else, and always takes care of its own.