Playing above the grass

From an article in The New York Times, this resonates with me: "Thomas R. Cole, author of a cultural history of aging, said he hailed anyone who, borrowing a phrase from his mother, age 85, 'is playing above the grass.' ”

What better way to put it? The ultimate division in life stages in five words. Far less of a cliche than keeping your head above water. Biggest problem is for those of us who never thought we would, regardless of circumstances, live to see past our 30th, 35th, or 36 birthdays. It's 15 years on now, and I hadn't anticipated this longevity.

Neither had several of my friends (a commonality I never expected to be growing each time I mention it). Thing is, we all forgot to plan. Live past 35? Really? From the age of 17, I somehow conjectured that twice that age would be about as good as it would get.

It seems I gravely miscalculated. Post-chemo, the miscalculation is all the more vivid. What has proved to be dead-on, though, is that about the time I was turning 35, the world I had known was becoming more and more lost and the world as it has come to be has taken over. Hey, I was an English major.

Apart from being the first family on the block to have a microwave; play Pong with the TV set sporting a green-on-black display; own a VCR old enough to record the original not-ready-for-prime-time SNL gang; and possess a home fax machine -- the better to see each week's football spreads, technology and I have not been fast friends.

Sure, the first computer moved in in 1985 -- and I've been editing on computer almost since my work life began -- but, honestly, I preferred it back in the day when I didn't feel electronics had showed my brain the door. I like to be smarter than the machines with which I'm involved.

The longer I play above the grass, the less likely it seems I have any interest in keeping up with the latest widgetry. The user-friendly concept and I seem to have had a falling out. I want my computer to be like a car: when I was 16, I could drive one just fine, and for the most part, nothing has changed on the dashboard to change that.

That's more than 30 years in real time. Thirty years in computer land is another story. While I can still operate the original computer, which had the best word processing software I've ever encountered, all the latest twists and wrinkles leave me cold.

It's a brave new world out there, and somehow, I forgot to prepare for it.

For Dona Marie Thomas Canales-Higgins

In memoriam: Dona Marie T. C-H March 2, 1991-October 31,2007

Ten things I know about Dona, who fought and bitched and sued and was ready to strangle the next pink-ribbon wearing woman. Ribbons don't cure cancer, and if you have it, do you really want a month of reminders commercialized everywhere? Dona didn't.

She had a neat one-page summary of all her chemo treatments, with a photograph of herself and all her relevant insurance info and contact names. Somewhere in my files, I have a copy.

In the end, none of it mattered: as of two years ago today, she is no longer with us. But this is what I know, or snippets from her lifespan.

1)she had blue contact lenses, to confuse people who wondered, how can a black woman have blue eyes?

2)she drove a Yugo, in the 1980s, and when she parked it, she put the club on her steering wheel.

3)she could have danced professionally

4)she taught me to dress better -- not to be so boring in the wardrobe department

5)she and I liked to make our college friends think we were lovers, just for the hell of it.

6)she liked her boyfriends to be other than traditionally handsome.

7)she loved her two children, Marcus and Thomas, more than anyone in the world. Thomas remembers her laughter; Marcus, her cough.

8)she and I spent hours at her uncle's house, watching the projection screen TV and frolicking around the pool

9)she bought me my first home pregnancy test, so I didn't have to

10)she was my dear friend, and I miss her.

White Noise

One element in the waiting room of any psychiatrist, analyst, psychologist, clinical social worker, and the like that I've noticed in my 30+ years making the rounds of various shrinks has remained constant: the white noise machine.

The device never changes its look, purpose, or sound. It's an off-white-to-beige circular plastic item about six inches in diameter and four inches in height, tethered to the wall by the inevitable extension cord, generating the same reassuring whoosh.

Everything else about the venue differs: from shrink to shrink, whether in shared office space or solo in what is now considered a home office, and used to be called the den, has changed over time. Innumerable faces hold countless certifications, and my sister/fellow-patients wait to enter or exit the closed office. Waiting room magazines bear new titles, cover lines, and dates, and even the type of bulb in the table lamps has gone green.

Still, white noise is white noise is white noise, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein badly. No one has come along with explosive technology to change anything about the machine, and it serves its purpose just fine.

Alice likes that in an a machine, that consistency. You never need to reboot white noise, just unplug it and move it to the next electrical outlet for your convenience.

Then again, if Alice could reboot her head, to make the synapses and neurotransmitters move in the alignment they may have had when Alice was a baby, before all The Troubles with Alice started, when she was a child, she would try to advance her techno knowledge to do so.

Technology and Alice faded out as partners circa 2001. Prior to that, Alice, oddly enough, was on the cutting edge -- online since 1993 successfully (vs. the 1985 inability to be pure techno junkie with the 300 baud modem); owner of PCs for 25 years, learned of untold number of operating systems.

Now? Alice wants everything simplified, as she would do so in her head. Alas, what is intuitive to Alice vs. the population at large spans a large gap.

In the meantime, Alice has made the leap into 21st century webgrrl. How?

Alice joins Facebook

Never say never, apparently. After about two years of rejecting invitations, Alice has given in. Web 2.0, here she comes. Or some variation and with major hesitation, Alice has decided to approximate a social networker.

She wonders if anyone else thinks Facebook is junior-high-school note-passing on steroids. Or high school folks simultaneously ducked out for a smoke of whatever substance pleases.

With enough "friends," Alice has discovered, on Facebook you're never alone. Hearing from someone you know, however vaguely, seems akin to to the result of tossing spaghetti on the wall and hoping some of it sticks. In real life, Alice believes if you have five true friends, you are blessed.

On Facebook however, it's all about quantity. "What's on your mind?" my opening page asks. Usually I don't think the answer suitable for public consumption. If you really want to Go Ask Alice, ask her here.

Among my questions: does Facebook actually bring together people who want to be rediscovered in one's life, or does it bring up parts of the past we'd really rather not acknowledge on a Wall.

Most of my Facebook "friends" are people I know personally, in real life. The rest are my blogging friends, whom I have known in cyberspace for many years.

Alice is very much a result of her breeding: she was raised as an anachronism, as it turns out. She wants a separate personal and professional life, boundaries of the 20th century that seem to be indistinct in the 21st century. And, like The Velveteen Rabbit, Alice wants to know what's real.

On Facebook, Alice finds communication somewhat detached. It has been prettied up with more applications than Alice will ever understand, and lots of icons that make much better sense in real life, i.e., getting someone a drink, rather than giving them the Facebook equivalent.

If someone handed you a photo of a glass of wine, there isn't anything to swallow, except metaphorically, and Alice isn't so sure Facebook addicts retain the ability to distinguish metaphor -- a polite and perhaps inexact term for our "secondary, simulated reality" -- for "first-degree reality."

She finds one determination best made in the pages analyzing Don Delillo's White Noise. It has been explained as follows:

"In 1983, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote Simulations. In it, he maintains that the postmodern world privileges simulacra over reality; we believe our secondary, simulated reality is more real than first-degree reality.

"His classic example is that Disneyland, a fantasy world, seems more real to us than the real world. DeLillo utilizes this idea throughout White Noise, focusing on a nation reared on the simulated reality of the media which even had a former actor (Ronald Reagan) as President at the time."

In 2009, we in Wonderland live with the white noise of our nanny-state governments. Which makes more pollution, bus exhaust or five minutes of second-hand tobacco smoke? Alice knows which way her vote is going, and it's not going in favor of Rudy and Mike, those key window dressers of her day.

Times Square didn't used to be Disneyland; it was a real, honest in the grittiest sense, place where Broadway and 42nd St. connected. Cars and pedestrians only, thankyouverymuch. Until now, when Mike has seen fit to shut the intersection to cars and spread out lawn chairs instead. Surely there are better places for lawn chairs -- Central Park comes to mind.

Lawn chairs aren't called "street chairs" for a reason. Note to Mayor Mike's office: move the damn chairs into a park. Don't leave them clogging the intersection. It's not as if there will be less traffic; it's just that the drivers are going to hit the road rage dial faster and faster as the traffic piles up.

And those horns blaring? A driver with road rage is not going to go forth under the white noise radar. No, horns blast white noise back to the shrink's office, where they work.

A few more words on White Noise:

"DeLillo says the idea for White Noise came to him while he watched television news, and realized that toxic spills were becoming such a daily occurrence that no one the news cared about them -- only those affected by the spills cared.

"We can see this idea play out in the airborne toxic event in White Noise, when people are upset that the media pays their crisis little attention, but it emerges in subtler ways when DeLillo examines the consumerist, technological atmospheres of death we create for ourselves -- from our living rooms to our cars to our supermarkets.

"DeLillo also takes a look at several more typically postmodern ideas -- ambiguity of identity, waste, racial heterogeneity, the family -- and gives them his astute, humorous spin. Though most readers find his view of American society harsh and pessimistic, others see the ending of White Noise -- with its bonding through consumerism in the face of death -- as subversively "uplifting."

Facebook is all about bonding, however ingenuously. We write on Walls; therefore we exist. We have some semblance of a connection with humanity. Yet Alice still hears streams of shrink-office white noise boxes, even as the air conditioner at home imitates the sound.

There is a gap, between what we write and what is real, or, more precisely, what we want to reveal and what seeing us in person would reveal. Into that gap floods white noise in all its manifestations, keeping us with one foot in Disneyland, and only one grasping the floor that is genuine and tangible and no imitation of anything but itself.