I watched intently, but I did not spot a little wrench to put the furniture together with.
Hands was an Irish TV program from about thirty or forty years ago that featured people who worked with their hands. I can find no current evidence of the Robinson and Sons furniture business on the Internet.
I feel a sort of affinity for this approach to making things for daily use. There is an acknowledgement of a lack of elegance in daily life. Searching for a kind of delight in using mundane things. A desire for at least a hat tip to continuity while not being a stick-in-the-mud about progress.
When I was young I had to type things on an ancient manual typwriter, and use carbon paper to save a copy for myself. I remember distinctly the first time I saw a Xerox machine. A Polaroid camera. A teletype machine. A fax. A cell phone. MS Office. I remember I was somewhat drunk at a party at my home, and some guests and I managed to get me on the Internet on dial-up on a lark. I remember loading Doom on a floppy and running it in DOS.
Sometimes it’s not possible to say whether we’ve entirely shunned modernity or we’re so far ahead of everyone else that we’re the Jetsons and most everyone else is the Flintstones. We don’t have cable TV. Our friends and family think we’re living in 1965.
You watch cable TV? And you get the newspaper printed and delivered? Send your children to school on a bus? Commute? Have heat fed by a big, rusty tub of carboniferous goo in your basement? Shop at a mall? How quaint you are.
I make things that are cutting-edge anachronisms. I like to see fellow travelers.
Look at Andres Segovia in the fifties. If you didn’t know who he was, I could have told you he invented a transistor, or reviewed mortgages at the savings and loan, or toiled in any number of mundane professions, and his appearance wouldn’t give it away.
People used to be serious, and you’d find serious people in every walk of life. Now all the Jeeves are dead, and everyone’s either a high or low budget Wooster. Who allows their work or their art alone to speak for them anymore?
Today, civilization gets in a few punches:
Put yourself in that man’s shoes, and his chair for a moment. Now stand up.
ReWalk. 150 grand, eight hour battery life.
When we went out to vote on November 7th, my wife and I had to drive by our son’s elementary school. We were mildly amused to spy him, out for recess, playing football in the schoolyard with his classmates.
We parked across the street and watched for a few precious minutes. Since we were not a butterfly, or a jet contrail, or a candy wrapper, or a penny, he didn’t notice us there, so we got to see him in that rarest of settings: “somewhere else,” without his parents or guardians present.
The football activity was hilarious. It alternatingly resembled an algae bloom and an ayatollah’s funeral– first a kind of milling around in an amorphous blob, then a kind of wild melee over a leathery old totem. We watched them drift back and forth for a pleasant minute, with the odd missile launch of the forward pass rocketing rudderless out of the scrum and landing any old place but that most rarified of targets: a teammate.
It was wry to consider that playing tag is verboten at his school. I’m not joking.
The school is getting comical in this regard. They were terrified of the food the little ones were eating, so they tinkered endlessly with the school lunch menu to make it so healthy that no one purchased it anymore. Now everybody eats fluffernutters they bring themselves.
They built an elaborate and very expensive handicapped playground. That’s a kind and thoughtful gesture. But it is merely a gesture, as there are no handicapped children to enjoy it. There just aren’t that many children of any kind in a little town like ours.
And no tag. Someone could get hurt. Someone could be left out. Someone could sue is the real reason, and the powers that be always point that out right up front.
Tag isn’t allowed, so one of the kids brings a football, and they play that. And football isn’t banned, because no one thought of it yet. And the absurdity of allowing mobs of pre-teens to chase one another if one is holding a ball, but not if their hands are empty, seems to be lost on the school administration. At least for now. And I, for one, am glad of it.
I’m not as worried about my son being injured playing football as I am in contemplating the little straitjacket world he’s being fitted for. Those children decided on the rules, supplied their equipment –a ball– and played their game without any adult supervision; and I saw a lot less kvetching among them than at any organized sporting event they participate in. I’m leery of them being told that someone will always tell them exactly what to do, and simultaneously unerringly protect them from not only from harm, but hurt feelings. One aspect of that tandem of supervision is repugnant, and the other unlikely.
I’m living in a strange world where people for whom I have no regard draw finely calculated and ultimately meaningless distinctions about everything down to the scope of activities allowed for pedophiles to roam the earth, at the same time they ban children playing tag in the schoolyard. Such distinctions are meaningless because anyone who is prepared to commit a great offense is not concerned about the rules governing small ones.
I dread the day, which is on the horizon now, not over it, when I’m forced to tell my children that the only sensible course of action is to ignore the rules, as there are so many of them that they become gibberish. And what the hell, the rules only seem to apply to those who wish to live worthwhile lives anyway –who never needed them in the first place.
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