Meeting the Stranger: a Packer fan on the East Coast

In his novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. pokes fun at the superficial allegiances people make, particularly those based on geography (something Vonnegut calls a granfalloon).  But as I traveled last week in the Northeast, I concluded that meeting people – no matter what shallow reason might be behind the introductions – makes for a more blessed venture.

For about a third of my twelve day trip, I sported either a Milwaukee Brewers shirt or a Green Bay Packers shirt.  And on these days, my attire inevitably resulted in meeting people I would never have spoken with otherwise.

Sure, some of the conversations were actually one-line quips that ended as soon as they began:

• The man at the visitor center in Cape Cod who said, “We don’t generally give advice to Packer fans.”
• The woman in Boston, who in spite of jogging with labored breath over a bridge, nonetheless heaved out a “Go Pack” as she passed me.
• The older gentleman in New York sporting a Yankees’ hat who, after noticing my Robin Yount shirt, said “You’ll be lucky to get out of this town alive.”  (I reminded him that the Yankees swept the Brewers earlier this season).

But I also had two lengthier conversations on two different subway rides – one in Boston, the other in New York, both of them only two stops long – that I’ll always remember, and that gave my already enjoyable trip an extra lift that only human interaction can provide.

After a ballgame at Fenway, I met a woman who noticed my family’s Packer paraphernalia, and in the two stops we had together, I learned that she was a social worker from Neenah, that she considered moving to New York but decided on Boston, that she had a boyfriend in Connecticut, that the beaches we were considering visiting were nice but crowded, and that we should consider transferring to the blue line because the green line is notorious for mechanical problems (note: we ignored her advice, and three stops later our train broke down).

In New York, I met a man who congratulated me on the Packers’ Super Bowl championship, announced that he was headed to a Yankee game even though the score was already 12-0 in favor of New York, applauded my son’s and my decision to go to the Empire State Building instead of joining my wife and daughters at a Broadway show, and professed his allegiance to Brett Favre no matter what Packer Nation had to say about it.  After I shared with him the details of my family’s trip, he said to my son, “You are one lucky kid.”

Of course, I couldn’t wear my Packers and Brewers garb every day.  For much of the trip, I wore shirts with solid colors or stripes, and on those days I spoke with fewer people, started fewer conversations, and went to bed with terrific memories of sites to behold, but not with that extra something, that extra spark that awakens after sharing just a bit of my life with a stranger.

We meet people for silly reasons all the time: for the places we come from, the teams we support, the places we work, the religions we practice, the music we like, the pets we own, the politics we share or oppose and the authors we read.

And we are better for it.

The Anti-Social Network

In the July 10 issue of the Chicago Tribune, columnist Fred Mitchell writes about the recent trend of ballplayers spending more time in the locker room texting, checking Facebook, playing video games and watching TV than actually commiserating with their colleagues.  He writes:

Times have changed from the days of ballplayers playing cards in the middle of the locker room, leafing through fan mail in front of their lockers, reading the newspaper or playfully teasing each other.

This might be a rather nostalgic view of the past, but it’s one I happen to share.

The potentially negative consequences of recent technological changes came to my attention about three years ago, when I noticed that parents picking up and dropping off their children at my home were no longer poking their heads in for a hello.  In fact, some of the kids we’ve hosted through the years have parents I have yet to meet.  Don’t know their names.  Couldn’t pick them out in a lineup.  That’s not only a shame, it’s kind of scary.  One of our seemingly endless list of parental responsibilities is knowing the parents of our children’s friends.

In the short six months I’ve owned a cell-phone, I’ve resorted to the anti-social behavior of texting my kids to let them know I’m waiting outside to take them home, but this is a habit I intend to break, extreme weather notwithstanding.   Generally, there’s time to say hello to people, and in life, there’s almost always room for a few more acquaintances.  Sometimes these acquaintances make my day.

Last week, I spoke to a parent at the pool for a good twenty minutes, and the conversation was so animated, so full of gems I couldn’t make up in a million years, I wrote our dialogue down as soon as I returned home, hopeful that I’ll be able to use it in a piece of fiction.  What if, instead of chatting, we’d both opted to check our email?  A more efficient use of our time, perhaps, but a real loss in social interaction.

Of course, technology isn’t responsible for all anti-social behavior.  This morning, it took one of my daughters ten minutes to acknowledge my existence, but I believe that sort of conduct began long before the cell-phone, the TV or even electricity.  And I also believe that time will help buck that trend.  If not, perhaps my incessant nagging will.

Joining the 21st Century: My First Cell-phone

Technology has a way of making itself indispensable.   Perceived conveniences are quickly converted into perceived necessities (recently highlighted by the power outages we experienced this week: “You mean we can’t watch the baseball game tonight?!). 

Six years ago I still had dial-up Internet access and checked my e-mail maybe twice daily.  Now I sometimes check twice within the same minute.

In 2006, a friend of mine introduced me to a website called YouTube to show me a slide-splittingly funny skit from Sacha Baron Cohen’s character, Ali G.  Within six months or so, I was visiting YouTube nearly every day, and by now it’s so ingrained into my daily usage, I’d be hard-pressed to do without it. 

And now I’ve really joined the 21^st Century by purchasing my first cell-phone, nearly two decades after my father purchased his first mobile phone.  Yes, I was apparently the last man in America without one, and my daughters were unquestionably the last 13 year-olds on the planet without this All-Important-Basic-Right-Of-Every-Man-Woman-And-Child. 

My aversion to owning a cell phone over the years were met with a variety of responses:  one friend resorted to calling me Ted Kaczynski (known in most circles as the Unabomber).  Others were simply dumbfounded that I could function without one. 

“How do people contact you?”

“They call me at home when I’m at home.  Just like they did with you ten years ago.”

 “What if there’s an emergency and someone needs to contact you and you’re not at home?”

“Then they’ll have to call someone else.”

“How do you talk to people when you’re not at home?”

My flippant response was typically, “I don’t really want to talk to anybody anyway,” figuring that characterizing myself as a misanthrope would end the questions. 

But in truth, I just didn’t want to be tied to yet another piece of technology that I was living without quite comfortably.

I never wanted a cell-phone.  I couldn’t stand the moms who walked down the aisles of Target talking loudly to friends about personal issues.  Couldn’t stand the guy at the park who couldn’t tear himself away from his phone long enough to watch his son go down the slide.  Didn’t like my wife glued to her Blackberry when we were on a trip.

That all changed last year when a few logistical mix-ups with my daughters led to elevated blood pressure and unnecessary outburst by yours truly.  After negotiating with the girls about the issue for a while, last December I purchased three cell-phones with unlimited texting, one for each of us.

Expectedly, within a short six months, I have become tethered to the little beast. 

I love it.  I’m not crazy about talking on the cell-phone – the quality is poor and I don’t like being interrupted – but texting has now become a way of life, and though my fingers go at about half the speed of my girls’, I now send upwards of a dozen texts a day, more if there are logistical issues with the kids.  Now I can finally get a response from my wife while she’s tied up at meetings.  In January, I was able to give my daughter highlights of the Packers/Falcons playoff game while she was at a party.  And I’ve been able to keep in touch in a fun, quick way with friends.

In short, I’m now addicted to yet another electronic device.  Add it to the list.  Hell, I even caved last year and joined Facebook. 

What’s next?  I figure my next holdout is using Groupon.

“You haven’t used Groupon?  How do you shop?!!”

I’ll get there.  Just give me a few years to judge your addictions first before they become mine.

Missing the Storm

Weather-related incidents can mark the mental timeline we use to navigate our past.  As one ages, and milestones become fewer and further between, the catastrophes of Mother Nature can help anchor us the way, say, an important national calamity can (do you remember the year of the Challenger explosion or the year the Iran Hostage Crisis began?  I bet you do.  1986 and 1979, respectively, for those of you playing along at home).  I still fondly remember the snow storm of ’79, less fondly the heat wave of ’95, and in Elmhurst where I currently live, people still talk about the flood of ’87.  Unfortunately, they’ll probably also be talking about the flood of 2010 for years to come, the Storm of the Century apparently occurring now every twenty-five years or so.

Floods are particularly harsh disasters to look back on with any kind of nostalgia, but other storms can foster warm memories or inspire animated yarns.  We may not be able to change the weather, and we may lean on the weather for small talk far too often, but living through a natural disaster makes for some good storytelling.   My grandfather used to regale me with stories about the weather, including the blizzard of 1947 in Milwaukee, when he had to abandon the city bus he drove for a living and head for a stranger’s home for shelter.  My son and I like to talk about the storm of August 2007, when we had to flee the highway in favor of Fry’s Electronics, and how it took us an hour to drive the five miles home due to fallen trees at every turn.

Storms can also bring us together, igniting a sense of community that’s so often absent from our lives, especially during the fleeting daylight of winter, when days seem to last no longer than an episode of The Office.  When my wife and I were living in New York in 1995, we knew no one in our apartment complex until the day it snowed.  Suddenly, every abled body was outside with a shovel, unearthing their cars like ancient artifacts.  The forty plus inches of snow in Chicago during December of 2000 helped acclimate my family to our new home as we met neighbors almost daily while we hoisted shovels of snow from our driveways and sidewalks.

As for 2011, I’ll never recall the great snow of two weeks ago when we were hit with twenty-plus inches the way I do past blizzards, because my wife and I happened to be in Las Vegas that week, the first time we’d been away from home without the kids for more than two nights since 1998.  And wouldn’t you know it?  We missed the biggest snow fall since 1967.  Vegas was great, but while we watched the Weather Channel for images of driving snow and the sounds of the very bizarre and, to me, heretofore unheard of “thundersnow,” I wished we could be experiencing it firsthand with the kids.  They’ll forever remember 2011 as the year of the blizzard.  I’ll remember it as the year my wife and I broke even.

At least, that’s what I thought until four days later.  Now we’ll all remember 2011 as the year the Packers won Super Bowl 45.  Fortunately, not all events that anchor our memories are weather-related.

What's Changed in Twenty Years? The PC

When my grandparents were still alive, I felt a strong connection to the reflections they shared of years gone by.  One theme that struck me again and again was the incredible number changes they witnessed during their seventy-plus years.  No other generation, it seemed to me, had undergone a more significant transition than they had.  Automobile to airplanes.   Handguns to nuclear weapons.  Terror of deadly and debilitating diseases to reliable vaccines.  Radio to TV.  Recorded sound, starting with LPs and evolving to CDs, to recorded video, first in a theater, then on TV and then on home video.  The discovery of DNA.  Electronic appliances.  Satellites.  Space travel.  Moon landings.  It’s mindboggling to me how so many of this generation managed to ride the wave of technology with grace.

As a college student in 1990, I once lamented to a friend that my generation (I believe we’re still called Generation X) had witnessed technological advances that paled in comparison to my grandparents’ generation, that there was not much left to discover.  Sure, you could make a car safer or more efficient, or you might allow for personalized space travel, but these achievements would merely be variations on a theme.  What was on the horizon that would truly change our world?

My friend thought about this for a minute, and then answered, “The personal computer!”

Nicely done, Mark.

At that time it was hard to me to recognize how personal computers would change the world, mostly because I didn’t have one.  None of us did.  We’d hoof it over to the computer lab on cold and snowy evenings and attempt to get Pascal to sort our data sets properly, and then we’d wrestle with the dot-matrix printer, rip off the perforated margins of our assignments and trudge back home.

In other words, personal computers weren’t so personal.  My friend Eric had had one as far back as 1985, and in high school he’d allowed me to compose my term paper on Alfred Hitchcock on his Mac.  That was definitely helpful and cool.  But life changing?  And where was MY computer?  Here we were five years later, and nothing much had changed.

My lack of vision when it comes to computers and their eventual counterparts – cell phones, navigation systems, ebooks, and the like – is probably why I’m not an entrepreneur or an innovator.  But did ANYone really see the next twenty years coming?  The first time I heard of the Internet was in 1993.  Could anyone at that time have predicted that in fifteen years there would be Youtube?  Amazon?  Facebook?  Wikipedia?  Googlemaps? 

Obviously, some did.  They’re billionaires now. 

I think it’s fair to say that what we’ve encountered during the past twenty years is as monumental as anything prior generations witnessed in the same span of time.  Maybe even more so.  The rate of change had been staggering, not just in terms of inventions, but it terms of real life changes.  Our ability to access information and communicate with other people is beyond anything most could have ever envisioned (excluding Ray Bradbury, who predicted it all by 1951).

In ten years time, will my children lament to a friend that there’s nothing more to discover?  If they do, I’ve no doubt that they’ll be blown away by the decades to come.  The capacity for human ingenuity is boundless.