Iron Mountain ski jump

Iron Mountain ski jump

Monday, August 10, 2020

OLD TECH DOGS & NEW TECH CARS [M, 8-10-20]

 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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