CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
I did my usual hour walk
this morning. I have become so efficient and proficient at it that it takes me
only 45 minutes now. My gerontologist is quite impressed. My psychotherapist
less so.
As I went along, I saw a
man walking in a side street, wearing a blue bathrobe and brown house slippers,
bare-legged and talking on a cell phone.
I don’t know why I point
out that it was a cell phone. Obviously it was not a land line, even though
these days land lines aren’t on the land and don’t have lines. And “cell” is a
leftover from when mobile phone transmitters looked like bee hives, with lots
of cells. They don’t have those anymore. But I suppose we’ll keep saying that
we dial phone numbers and roll down car windows, too.
Anyway, I figured the
isolation had finally gotten to the man in the bathrobe. He just had to
get out of the house, right now. I mean, surely he would normally be
embarrassed to be seen in public mixing blue and brown that way. [Yes, I know
guys on TV do it all the time, and they should be embarrassed.] But when he got
to the main street, he stopped and looked both ways for a while, then went back
toward his house.
I walk by his house
regularly, so I know he got a new car, and it was not in his driveway, so I
surmised that it was one of those new self-driving cars, and the isolation had
gotten to it, too, and it had just taken off. I mean, cars these days don’t
even get to go out to the gas stations. The
man was probably talking to the Bluetooth in it, trying to convince it to come
home, looking anxiously down the street to see if it had gone to visit a friend
in another driveway.
There are other
explanations, like looking for a dog that had decided it had gotten too much
iso, too, and thus bolted the house [Interesting how “bolted the house” can
have opposite meanings, isn’t it? A contranym.] I have run out into the street
myself in a blue bathrobe when a dog was involved [but not with brown slippers].
I like the car explanation
best, though, because it gives us a glimpse into the future. Dogs are old tech.
They’ve been escaping to look for treats for years.
Like the one our friends
told us about. One day it just picked up its water dish in its mouth and moved
across the road to live with the neighbors. It was an amicable divorce. “It
still comes back to visit, but it lives over there now. The neighbors are sort
of mystified. They don’t know why, either.”
Cars don’t usually go off
on their own like that. Although my Grandpa Mac did have a Model T that was
sort of a self-driver. He propped it with a 2x4 while he used the crank to
start the motor. But once the engine was rumbling and he pulled the post from
the tires, the car would go on its own, and Grandpa had to jump into it as it
went by.
There’s no point to any of
these observations. But they have nothing to do with viruses or police
brutality or the end of democracy, and sometimes I just need to think about
dogs and cars that leave because they can’t take it anymore. I understand.
John Robert McFarland
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