Tues. March 8... a Big Day

This is an OLD essay, written March 8, 2011, that sat around as a draft.

Today is a big day for at least two reasons. First, it is the one-hundredth anniversary of a day Jessie, my mother, the old Suffragette, loved: International Women's Day. We discussed it at our poetry group last week, and everyone is writing a poem for the day, to be read next week. In the meantime, the great intellectual in the group, David, read us a story about a Russian woman who worked and fought in Paris for women's rights. David of course, as usual, knows more about Women's Day and the whole history of the fight for women's rights than any of the women in the group. But then, he undoubtedly knows more about anything that might come up than anyone, male or female in the group. So Jessie, be reassured... the day is becoming better known and better celebrated now, and women are slowly and surely, at least in the industrial world, becoming not only better educated and healthier, but also slowly moving up the pay scale toward men. Not equal yet in my lifetime, nor in Whitney's, but perhaps in my grandchildren's lifetime. Callie could make it... after all, in fourth grade she tested in the top two percentile of children in the country. You go, Callie and make us all proud!! Jess would love you.

Charlie Rose, as one would expect, has a program with three women discussing what is happening by and with women of the world. Tina Brown, who is now editor of Newsweek is one, the woman who formed Women 4 Women, Zaineb Salbi, another is Dina Powell, who does women's start-ups around the world, for Goldman Sachs. All of them talk about the fact that women MUST be allowed a place at the table to not only help a country build itself up well, but also in all war and peace negotiations. i.e. EQUALITY... or perhaps let us show YOU how to do it, as we can do it better.

Secondly, today is Mardi Gras down in New Orleans... and as Whitney is wont to tell me, in all of Louisiana, including her little town, where their third house is located. I hope they had better weather than they expected... well, at least no reports of hurricanes and the news photos showed millions of people celebrating in the streets of New Orleans. I was sure happy to see that. God knows they need the visitors. They are rather like us in S.F... they need the tourists to stay alive. We haven't had much 'tourist weather' lately and I hope our summer is better this year then it was last year. Spring has at least given us gorgeous flowering fruit trees and some very nice blossoms. Hope it bodes well for Summer and Fall. Actually, it matters to me little, as long as the sun shines on my lovely San Francisco. So now we have Lent. Does anyone observe Lent anymore? Ah, school days, when it was fish, fish, fish.

My God, I’m Old As Babar                   

A short message on my radio the other day threw me for a loop. The morning commentator was announcing all the events and birthdays of the day and finished up with “And Babar the Elephant is 80.” Recoiling in shock, I thought, good heavens, I read those books to my children. Weren’t they ‘old’ then? I wasn’t reading first editions, Babar was an institution, or so I thought. But no, he is in my generation.

Oh dear, am I older than god? And, am I to be constantly reminded of my age by these young people on the radio, on TV, everywhere, saying in amazement how very old everyone and everything that surrounds us is?

Sometimes it scares me when I look around and see all of the things that this generation takes for granted as having been here ‘forever.’ I can remember when there was one telephone in a home. Well, not even in every home. We had one that had a separate earpiece that hung on a hook at the left side of the tall, standing phone. We children did not use the phone, it was for adults, and my grandmother was afraid to use it. She was sure it brought only bad news.

We entertained ourselves with books (my family had a full library of them), board games, and ‘playing outside.’ Oh, we had a radio, a large one, but my mother considered most of the children’s programs to be a bit ‘low class’ so my sister and I did not listen to “Little Orphan Annie” or “Jack Armstrong, All American Boy.” However, I can still sing the theme songs of those programs, as I simply sat beneath the window of the house next door, where the children were allowed to listen to everything, and heard the programs. That was my ‘playing outside.’

Oh, we were allowed to listen to some radio programs. There was one that I suppose was considered the “Sesame Street” of its day, It was a pallid little show with nursery rhymes and I suppose proper children’s stories, but I can neither remember its name nor actual form, only the theme song, which rattles around in my head, da, da, ti, da/ti, da, da, ti da/ti, da, da, ti, da, ti, da da, followed by a lovely lady opening the show. Undoubtedly a “Miss” someone, as in the insipid children’s shows that were on TV during my daughter’s era of childhood. I did not allow her to watch them, she was sent to ‘play outside.’

I moved to San Francisco at a rather advanced age and retired here. After retirement I volunteered at a senior center. My first assignment was teaching seniors to knit and crochet, as I had been a teacher of crafts most of my life. I had learned to use computers on my copywriting jobs in advertising in Chicago and owned the first Mac, a 128K, which I loved, so I naturally fell into the role of teacher of computing to seniors. There were no books on this, or rules, so I made up my own, writing the directions for turning on the computer and what to do next. We were using something called DOS, which probably means nothing to most people who will see this. It was a clunky Microsoft program, with very uncertain directions for use, which started with step three or four.

When I asked a young man from Microsoft why they were written without steps one, two and three, his answer was, “Well, everyone knows that.” I don’t think I ever got through to him that yes, all those engineers at Microsoft knew ‘that,’ but the rest of the world didn’t. That’s why I still own Macs, they always tell you steps one, two and three, with illustrations showing them, including where the ‘on’ switch is located.

Ah, I am so old I raise laughter in those younger than I when I tell them that I sat at a computer in the offices of SeniorNet surrounded by eager computer ‘geeks’ and in amazement typed a conversation with the president of New Zealand. I was ‘talking’ to that charming lady, on the computer, and not paying the phone company to do it. That was, I was talking to her until the line was broken, no doubt by a storm or some such, and we were left, still in a flurry of excitement, thrilled to have gotten through to New Zealand online. Now I chat with my friend Connie on Skype and think nothing of it.

She is always on Skype. I taught her how to use her computer -- over the phone, with me, the Mac expert in San Francisco, to her in Chicago. After a few lessons she asked me why the little arrow went up when she moved the mouse down and down when she moved the mouse up. I sat, confused for a moment, then asked where she had the cord to the mouse. Connie said she had it where the mouse’s tail should be, at the back. Such logic I had seldom seen... she was holding the mouse upside down. Well, it was just the way one would hold a real mouse, wasn’t it? Of course.

Connie is younger than I, as is almost everyone in the world. I did teach her the basics on the computer, as I have so many people, but she now outshines me. She went on to get a degree in computer usage, and teaches things like 3-D animation, etc. Things that are beyond my knowledge, as are many of the twenty-first century’s innovations. But then, when you are older than Babar, there have got to be a few things you don’t know about or understand.