Aline Soules

How many people does it take to change a lightbulb?  Thus goes the old joke.  A newer version might be:  How many people does it take to install a printer?  or How many people does it take to complete other software tasks on one’s computer?  My son and daughter-in-law, computer whizzes both, are always willing to help, but even they can’t avoid all the “wrinkles.”

I’ve been having computer challenges lately (euphemism for “grrr, my computer’s acting up) and now I have my old dying one, a netbook PC, and a brand new Mac.  To go with them, I have an HP printer/fax/scanning machine—it’s been fabulous over the years I’ve had it (a gift from the two computer whizzes).  Discussion among these devices is still dicey, but slowly shaping up.  My Mac installed my printer automatically when connected, but the notebook?—not so much.  I have to download a driver first.  All discovered by my clever relatives.

All this seems such an analogy for daily life:  people who function beautifully by themselves but can’t inter-relate, people who speak eloquently but can’t communicate, people who act at cross-purposes—essentially oblivious to each other.  Our need to communicate has driven us from conversation to letter to telephone to email to Facebook to twitter to messaging and beyond, but we still have trouble getting through.  In this holiday season, we will likely spend more time with friends and family than at any other time of year.  Perhaps the most important gift we can give each other is the gift of communication—both sharing and listening/hearing—and seeing through the windows that lead us to know each other better.

My lifelong friend, Christine, just became a grandmother.  She and I go back to infancy.  We are six weeks apart in age, we are both only children, and we grew up across the street from each other in Dundee, Scotland.  I have black and white photos that go back to our toddler-hood and I suspect she does, too.  In fact, she may have copies of some of the same photos.

We both married within a few years of each other.  I had a son on July 28, 1979 and she had a daughter on Nov. 7 of that year.  Now her daughter has a son, born Nov. 8 of 2013.  Even as my friend became a grandmother, she also underwent heart surgery (her family has spent quite some time in the UK national health system lately).  Various parts of the life cycle playing out simultaneously.

Each generation lives parallel lives.  We acquire spouses, children, grandchildren and life experiences on similar timelines.  It gives us shared experiences that translate into greater understanding for the most part.  When we commiserate when someone is widowed or gets cancer, it’s generally because some of us have already experienced that and can empathize, not just sympathize.  When we receive kudos for a job well done or congratulations on an accomplishment, the same empathy is extended.

Empathy is so more intimate than sympathy, yet harder to achieve.  It takes a lifetime to enable empathy and it explains so much about how challenging it is for  younger people to empathize.  Young doctors listen to their patients, but can they really hear? Sons and daughters try to help their parents with health issues or the decisions of their shrinking worlds, but may feel helpless and unable to empathize or even understand.

As we experience the later arc of our lives, we cherish moments more as we grow in awareness of how few remain.We empathize with and value our contemporaries’ experiences, knowing that this may be among the last of them.

This fall has been glorious.  Outside my window today, I see sunlit leaves, a red geranium flower, the last yellow roses wavering on a fragile stem, and the still-green leaves of my jasmine.  I cherish them in ways that I don’t in spring and that I certainly wouldn’t if I were still a young woman and I look forward to the new life they will offer next year.

Rather than applying this to business, I just read a post on Al Garrotto’s blog called “An Edited Life.”  What he’s really talking about is possessions.  He and his wife sold a larger house for a smaller townhouse, which could be called downsizing, and have reduced their possessions or, at least, begun that process.  I don’t think it’s downsizing, though.  I think it’s right-sizing.  In one of the comments from blog followers, there is reference to another web site that espouses minimalism, a laudatory goal.

As I pointed out in my comment on Al’s blog, this is an endless process. My current three rules are these:

• if I bring something into my house that’s permanent, something must be taken out
• If I ditch something, it’s one less thing that my son has to deal with at my inevitable end
• You spend the first half of your life acquiring things and the next half trying to get rid of them.

I am not always as good about this as I should be.  My nemesis is papers.  While the computer age was supposed to address this, I am still working full-time as a librarian/professor at Cal State East Bay and that means everything from student papers to my own research to things I need to read to other flotsam that washes up on my paper-rich job shores.  I like to think that when I retire in some distant future, all these papers will be happily junked, but I fear that may not turn out to be true.

As for the rest of my possessions, there are few that I cling to:  the oil portraits of my grandparents, painted by a well-known artist around the time they were married in 1902, some old photos (although I’m slowly digitizing them), a few mementos of my parents who lost much of their possessions in war and in lean times, and sentimental items from my son’s growing years.  I also have books—not nearly as many as I used to, but books that are not available in e-form.  If they come in e-form and I want to keep them, I buy the e-version and give away the print copy.

Of course, I’ve also acquired computers, cell phone, flat screen, DVR, and other assorted technologies, but I suspect that these will be more fleeting than the older things.  I’ll have to replace them more often, I suspect, as one technology gives way to another.  I love my technologies, though, because they allow me to get rid of physical objects and carry around a library on a Kindle.

All of that said, there is one thing I’ve never given up—the toys.  I have a train set that belonged to my late husband’s grandfather, lead paint and all.  I have a Noah’s Ark more recently acquired, no lead paint at all.  I have children’s books and games and soft toys and other amusements from three generations.  They keep me buoyant, even if they just lie fallow in my house.  They remind me that life is supposed to be fun.  This photo in front of the robot toy museum in Prague drew my eye and is one of my favorite things about visiting the castle—you see it on the way out, almost as an afterthought, but it’s the exhibit that draws me.

The sun of the fading year is somehow clearer, making leaves translucent and giving light to the approaching darkness.  The toys will be with me in winter, too.