Here's the drill


There was a fire drill at my mother's Philadelphia apartment building the other night. It wasn't a big deal, and only a few tenants - mom included - heeded the warning to move outdoors.

That my mother acted quickly would not be a surprise were she younger than her 89 years. What's even more compelling is that she managed to help a blind neighbor who lives a few doors away from her navigate the four flights of stairs to the lobby. 

This is too easy, but I'll write it anyway: We're talking abut the blind leading the blind. One actually unable to see, the other sighted but slow.

Knowing my mother, she likely used the occasion to engage with other neighbors waiting outside. Let's face it, few things have as much potential for socializing as standing with others in your pajamas. In my mom's case, the potential is always there, no matter what she's wearing - even funeral black. She will converse with total strangers in language more suited to family and friends - and in the unlikeliest of places. 

The other day, the setting was a Chinese restaurant, where as she headed to the bathroom, she stopped to ask a couple at a nearby table what they were eating, leaned over them, picked up their platter and held it aloft for me to see, noting that we should have the softshell crab sushi next time we go.

She'll also start a conversation with people who live in her building if she hasn't come across them before. She starts with a boisterous hello, disregards the wary eyes of the other person, and ends with,  "Nice talking to you hon."

Meanwhile, I lightly tug her hand to move us along. 

Mom also won't miss a chance to engage with someone when only a few words are necessary. The guy at the bank, for instance, who only needs to know her account number, and for his trouble, gets to hear that she's been banking there for 60 years, balances her checkbook to the penny and "Why don't you have tellers anymore?"

This is why I like to say my mother has no business being part of what's known as the Silent Generation, those born between 1928 and 1945, who tend to believe in traditional values and norms, aren't known for political protests and find that the way technology supersedes personal interaction is a "damn shame."

I guess if my mother did communicate the way most of us do now with our phones, her dialogue would be shorter and to the point. You can't have more than 160 characters in a text, right?  

For mom, that would constitute an opening sentence.   


bing.com


 

    


   




 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One lump or two?

One of my mother's favorite lines from way back is, "Don't just stand there with your teeth in your mouth." It meant, in her vernacular, that we should do something useful, and not that we needed to see a dentist. But another saying of hers always seemed to me to defy sense or meaning: "If they don't like it, they can lump it." As in when my mother - who had a lot of short-term, part-time jobs - made so many demands on employers, we made a joke of one of them: "I can't work on days that begin with T and I need the whole summer off. If they don't like it, they can lump it." Lump it. So just what did that mean? I don't know what took me so long, but I Googled the answer.  Turns out it does have a sensible meaning after all, according to the Cambridge Dictionary: If you tell someone to like it or lump it, you mean that they must accept a situation they don't like because it won't be changed.  But what exactly does lump mean in ...
Read more

Dumbing-down TV

Image
I was walking into a Sam's Club recently when I found myself surrounded by gigantic televisions, their  screen savers so large and vivid, I felt like Dorothy when she crossed the threshold from dreary black and white to the Technicolor of Oz.   At their size, one of these babies could have been deadlier to the Wicked Witch than the house that dropped on her.  Those are smart TVs, my husband informed me. So I thought, "What makes them smart?" "Does size have anything to do with it?"  It does; big is smarter these days when it comes to TVs. That means my mother has one of the dumbest televisions around. It would look like a toaster next to the models of 85 inches or more I spotted at Sam's.  Her remote doesn't do much more than turn the TV on or off. She also can't fast forward or rewind. She can't talk to it and request yet another viewing of "Terms of Endearment." She gets about four stations, including the Catholic channel; the latter ...
Read more

The Sev and the square

Image
This blog recently had an anniversary. Sort of.  It's been 35 years since the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in China that resulted in one of the most indelible images in history: a young man stands in front of a tank advancing into Beijing's Tiananmen Square. He didn't hesitate, nor did he move out of the way. He carried what looked like shopping bags in each  hand, as if he'd stopped at the store for bread and milk on the way to risking his life. No one knows what happened to him after he was whisked away by authorities. He has never been positively identified, except to be dubbed Tank Man.  Some of you who are regular readers may have already guessed where I'm going with this. Tiananmen Square became part of my mother's vernacular, a place where good, solid words go to wither and die.   "I want to go to Tiramisu Square," she told me. I could have given this blog a different name derived from the list of mom's malaprops, somethin...
Read more