on the cusp

I was talking with my friend Mark. I don’t know what we were talking about. We were sitting and talking on his deck and he was getting stoned and free-associating. We were talking about the internet.

“We’re the generation that saw the world change,” he said. Something like that. “We were fully in the world before the internet. And now here we are, fully in the world with the internet.” Fully in the world: working, doing chores and errands, entertaining ourselves. Going to the bank branch, before anyone called it a “brick-and-mortar” bank, all banks were made of brick and mortar. Renting videos at the video store. You know all the examples. That was life before the internet. And now we work from home or from Panera Bread; order laundry detergent from bed; take accounting classes; move money while we’re on the train; watch Drag Race while we drive. You know all these examples, too.

We were that generation, uniquely. My mom enjoys posts on her social media sites of choice and opens bank accounts on her phone, but she never taught school with all the wonderful, frustrating tools that would be at her disposal today, tools with anachronistic names like “Blackboard” and “Canvas.” My dad would email, very occasionally, but if he needed to call the plumbing supply company he would pull out a printed phone book and pick up the landline. Which we used to call a phone. He did this recently enough that I was surprised to realize they still printed phone books.

We were the before-and-after the internet generation uniquely, but we could make the mistake of thinking we’re the only generation that’s lived on a cusp. Some generation was the first to live in a world before the telephone, and then to live in the world when picking up the phone was routine. Some generation lived before automobiles, and later roared down the highway in roadsters. Or radio, or television, or routine air travel. Time ruptures, and you’re puzzled by it, and then used to it, and then occasionally nostalgic for the blue-and-yellow Blockbuster logo, or for the thrill of seeing The Wizard of Oz when it was only available once a year.

Where I grew up, when I was going to school, was mostly open countryside. At the Middlemarch Academy, my classmates, even my teachers, would stand slack-jawed as I described where I lived; they would talk about my commute home as if I passed Here Be Monsters signposts when I entered Delaware County. (The Academy Life once published a two-page spread about life in the country, extolling the bucolic scenery and unusual odors surrounding my family’s house.)

Today, as I write this, I sit in a Panera Bread five minutes from the old homestead, in a nowhere town that for a long time had no residents, just forty or fifty businesses serving passers-by. McDonald’s was first, I think; then Wendy’s, and then they came so thick and fast that no one can remember which was next: Taco Bell, KFC, Waffle House, Arby’s, Long John Silver’s, Burger King, Cracker Barrel, Starbucks, others I can’t remember at the moment. Now a Chipotle and a Greek place share a building, and I don’t really feature that people eat souvlaki while speeding down I-71, but maybe that just indicates how I’m being borne back ceaselessly. The other day, my niece gave me a puzzled look when I told her I had to mail a check to my landlord.

I lived fully in this place, baling hay on the neighbor’s dairy farm and showing steers at the county fair. There’s still a county fair, but you can count the steers on two hands. The son of the neighbor who was the first person ever to pay me an hourly wage tore down his old dairy barn not long ago. It had outlived its usefulness. Nobody can make a farm work economically anymore with herds numbering in the dozens and acres numbering in the hundreds.

Does this sound maudlin? It could be maudlin. It shouldn’t be. I don’t mourn the world that’s going or gone; a lot of it sucked. My nieces and nephews have no idea how bad food was in this country fifty years ago. Take the worst bread you can imagine buying now. That was the average when we were kids, and the spectrum of breads sold at Big Bear¹ ranged from slightly better to imperceptibly worse. When I was a kid, pasta was called spaghetti and it came with red sauce, a meatball if it was fancy. Not until many years later, after I had graduated from college, did some friends take me to an Italian joint called Nonni’s to discover pesto.

So I don’t miss that life. What I still reach for is the wonder. Still today I smell basil and remember sitting in a cool and modern room, among smart and witty friends, suddenly realizing we were peers, and tasting a remarkable, unheard of combination of flavors. I was so green I had never heard of pesto; I only ordered it because I was working at one job that paid me six dollars an hour and another that paid me four, and pesto was the cheapest thing on the menu. I twirled some linguine on my fork, bit into it, and gates were flung open.

“A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.” Camus may have written that, or may not have. A hundred sites on the world wide web - remember when we called it that? - will tell you he did, in some version, and none of them will say when or where. The internet has made tracking it down both mundane and impossible. I could go to a brick-and-mortar library and try to track it down. I can just become the latest to put it in front of you and let you decide whether to believe it.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. I was green when I went to a hip Italian restaurant in a suddenly trendy neighborhood - I ran back and told people about it and was disappointed when they replied, “yeah, I like pesto too.” I was green, too, when I drove with a friend to the gay rights march in Washington in 1993, more green than some who were there - on the DC Metro we met a woman who had marched down Fifth Avenue in New York’s first gay rights march in 1970. But we were all encountering the wonder of discovering what it felt like to assert our full humanity. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and, although I didn’t realize it, I was young, too.

Here we are, thirty years later, wondering how fleeting that dawn will be - whether this new world we’ve lived in fully will be borne into the past with us. Prior Walter’s promise that “the world only spins forward” seems optimistic, even for me.

And yet. We beat on, boats against the current. Will I hate some of the future, the deeds of a feckless legislature? No doubt. Will more of it be banal, the soulless architecture of the houses that have sprung up behind the Waffle House? Doubtless that as well. Among them wonders remain. In any case - Jesus, I’m giving you Fitzgerald, Camus, Wordsworth, Kushner, now Thoreau; you should be paying me for this survey course - in any case, we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake….

Well, let him say it:

I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

1. Gone, merged into something called Giant Eagle. Why the fascination with oversized predators in the local grocery business?