Category: Uncategorized

Sometimes, just being a helpful and thoughtful person in the right place at the right time becomes a gift or talent in itself. Over time, that gift becomes experience, which in turn becomes skill. Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out.

Not too long ago I went to a cemetery to visit the grave of a man I didn’t know. He didn’t know me, either. In fact, if his current status permits some knowledge of us, he was probably quite surprised by my visit. I like to think he was also pleased, and maybe even relieved.

The cemetery is in Portland, Oregon. It is a small hole in the wall. Or, more accurately, a series of holes next to the very large wall of a U-Haul depot in an industrial part of town that was in all probability less industrial when its vocation as a final resting place was imagined and established.

The man was a Civil War veteran. His small, simple tombstone declares only his first two initials, his family name, and “CORP. 41^st OHIO INF.” The man’s first two initials were R. P. His family name was—almost—mine. Most of the raised stone letters are worn, some almost completely illegible. I wouldn’t have known it said 41^st if I didn’t know something about him.

In my lifetime, R. P. has been a controversial figure, though I don’t know if he was controversial in his own.

R. P.’s 41^st Ohio fought in several important battles of the Civil War. When R. P. mustered out of the Grand Army of the Republic in San Antonio, he remained in the South, and by 1867 had made his way to south Georgia. There he married the widow of a Confederate soldier and began farming. He was among many who did so. They had been married less than a year when he took the cotton crop to market and never returned. The wife he abandoned was pregnant with his son. Neither they nor their offspring ever heard from or of R. P. again. Surely he was among many for whom that, too, might be said.

In generations older than mine, any discussion of R. P. was generally accompanied by expression of clear relief that he had married the mother of his young son. While there was some shame to be borne that he was a Yankee soldier, at least they were married. Conversation about R. P. usually included that fact and little else. He was by no means a respected or beloved figure among his progeny. In my generation and those generations younger than mine, nobody talks about him at all.

I am his great-great grandson, have known of him for decades, yet confess that I gave him very little thought in my lifetime.

The only reason I know of his grave is the internet. Genealogy is much easier than it used to be, and my father has accumulated an impressive amount of information about R. P., his great-grandfather. Most of that information comes from descendants of R. P.’s siblings who have tracked and traced facts that my father’s branch of the family neither possessed nor sought to acquire. The digitization of veterans’ and federal benefits records, and of the census, revealed a great deal about R. P. and his movements and entourages to those who undertook to research his life. His story is one that would not have been imagined by those he had left in south Georgia and the generations that followed them.

Of particular interest is the fact that the name he passed down to me differs by only one letter from the name he used both before and after leaving it as part of my legacy from him. Whether that difference is due to the vagaries of contemporary spelling or his ineptitude or sloth in crafting an alias for the short chapter of his life that was inscribed in south Georgia is unknown.

The context of the assembly of facts about his life is, ultimately, that R. P.’s story was representative of its times during those defining moments of the nation’s evolution and projection.

When he left his wife in south Georgia he returned to Ohio, whence he had enlisted in the war. There, he quickly married another woman, and they had two daughters. We thus know that R. P. was a bigamist. Surely that might be said of many like him. The family moved to Michigan, where one daughter died, young.

Some years later, the remaining daughter was stricken with consumption. R. P. accompanied her to a spa in La Veta, Colorado, a town south of Denver, where one of his brothers had settled as a farmer, businessman, and proprietor–  or at least manager– of a sulphur springs bath. R. P. took her there to be cured, but the cure did not take and his second daughter, too, died, young. He took her body home to Michigan.

In a compelling part of the story that neither surprises nor shocks those of us in subsequent generations of what became our family, R. P.’s nephew, Elmer, among other pursuits, “tended” billiards halls in Colorado, and he, too, died young.

Not long after R. P. bore the body of his daughter back to Michigan, he and his wife headed west. They ended up in Portland. R. P. didn’t last long  in Oregon and was buried where I found him. His wife remarried and is buried elsewhere. So R.P. has been truly alone.

R. P. does not enjoy the status of respected or beloved ancestor by my family, yet I was overcome by sorrow visiting his grave. He died not knowing the son he left behind in Georgia—perhaps not even knowing that his wife was expecting– and surely still grieving the two daughters he lost when they were young. Imagine the constant weight and special pain R. P. must have felt after surviving the horrors of several Civil War battles only to outlive his children. Imagine the pride and, perhaps, solace R. P. might have derived from knowing his son, by then an ordained Methodist minister. As the cemetery that was his destination is not a veterans’ cemetery, the only sentiment of his we can be certain of is the importance he placed on his rank and affiliation with an infantry unit in a war that had ended more than forty years earlier.

So R. P. could not have expected my visit– someone four generations after him, yet from him, calling on him to pay my respects. He could not have envisioned the many of us who now bear his (wrong, fake, misspelled, or, possibly, true) name. As far as he knew, he had not conferred it on a succeeding generation. Thinking of our current number provoked me to pour a libation on his grave. All I had was half a travel mug of coffee, so that had to do.

As far as I know, I am his only descendant via his son to visit his grave. I felt a strong sense of having honored this man somehow, even though I have no insight into what he considered an honor, other than the military service that defines him on his tombstone. I, in turn, felt honored to be with him, if only for a brief instant of his long, lonely repose.

Instant access to digital platforms bearing whatever information we want whenever we want it has led to a swift evolution of our notion of the “present.” The evolution is ongoing, however, as the youngest adults among us struggle to define what, exactly, now constitutes the present. The casualties of this struggle include what previous generations would have considered priorities represented by the notion of the present. As part of this evolutionary transformation driven by generational differences, newer definitions of the present and its priorities will prevail sooner rather than later.

In the same way that “virtual reality” has come to complement reality, a “virtual present” has begun to dominate the attention and actions of the younger members of most societies. The concept of the present that has prevailed throughout human existence is under assault. This sometimes means that what humans have always considered the present is now sacrificed to the omnipresent. Examples abound in daily life. Older people notice—often disapprovingly—that “kids nowadays” pay little or no attention to hard copy mail and decline to answer ringing land-line telephones. These formerly dominant methods of transmittal of important information are, to young people, confusing or anachronistic because they demand immediate attention to what they regard as only a slice of the present, rather than the at-will consideration of the many possible presents afforded by digital platforms. Handling a piece of mail or accepting the tether of a phone call requires full attention there and then, rather than partial and/or on-demand consultation, thus interrupting the flow of the “virtual present” that exists across the many commingled simultaneous platforms of the digital world.

A perhaps more serious threat to traditional timelines is that deadlines, too, have come to be regarded as needlessly static in a world at flux. A deadline that arrives by hard copy mail, or even email, cannot hope to compete with the many other streams of information to which no specific window of time is attached—and, indeed, often sinks and drowns in that stream. Younger people today operate under an assumption that deadlines can be dealt with according to one’s own priorities, just like finding something on the internet is. That assumption is sometimes mistaken, yet it increasingly prevails. It is likely that the notion of “deadline” will, in many cases, evolve to fit the reality of omnipresence, rather than remaining attached to a traditional definition of the present.

In fact, modern life provides decreasing incentive to address something right in front of us—the present—when what matters to us is, or should be, omnipresent. This is a fundamental change in the way humans comprehend the present and the attention the idea of “the present” has always commanded. Throughout history, what is “present” has been what is happening or experienced now. The present was also accompanied by its priorities. Those priorities might be addressed or willfully ignored, but at least they merited some attention. That concept of “present,” however,  now competes with many other “presents” that can be accessed anywhere instantly. The present has become something that is no longer firm and immutable. The priorities, attention, and presumed action the present traditionally demanded are now subject to interpretation, evaluation, and—most importantly—comparison with other presents.

The adage, “There is no time like the present” still exhorts us toward action in the way it always has, but the emergence of competing virtual presents furnish a completely new second meaning. Try saying the phrase while accenting the word “no.”  This is a different notion altogether, but one that is demonstrably true today. We can expect even swifter and surer evolution of the concept—presently.

 

N. B. This is a companion piece to a prior post about internet-driven generational sociological change.

 

 

 

 

We are witnessing an evolutionary change in humanity’s approach to possessions, collections, and memorabilia. What for millennia drove us to acquire and possess no longer motivates young people who have never known a non-digital world. Human beings were once collectors, but are gradually abandoning that and becoming, instead, connectors.

For millennia, humans lived with an assumption of scarcity and thus collected anything deemed scarce. First manifested in the hoarding of saved food or fuel or livestock, this human urge expanded to include the desire to possess more and more of anything of value. Physical collections and the collecting of art, cars, orchids, stamps, baseball cards, photos, antiques, family memorabilia—pretty well anything—generated prestige, pleasure, and pride among individuals and groups. Collecting became something humans aspired to and spent time enjoying.

In many ways, this instinct no longer governs the youngest among us: they have an assumption of availability rather than an assumption of scarcity. This trend is demonstrated daily in ways large and small. Parents save news clippings, schoolwork, videos and photos (the latter, in a concession to modernity, perhaps saved on the hard drive of their computer). Their children do not. Many, if not most, parents still assume that these items are finite and scarce; children assume that they are eternally available on digital platforms. What humans considered the intrinsic value of ownership and intimacy with collected possessions does not register as strongly with young people. To them, the notion of “owning” or “collecting” things is somewhat quaint and pointless. What they want or seek will always be there, on a website, app, or other medium, so why “keep” it?

Furthermore, to the young, living under the assumption of scarcity rather than availability represents a needless burden. Such an assumption limits options and monopolizes time, space, and other resources that might be spent sampling more and varied interests. A collection of music on CDs or a shelf of carefully organized scrapbooks and photo albums falls squarely into this category.

The difference of approaches leads to generational misunderstandings and failure to appreciate one another’s perspectives. Older generations were raised to keep certain things; they thus consider younger generations’ “failure” to demonstrate enough interest in these things impatience or misplaced dedication to fads and impermanence. The young believe their approach represents faith in the notion of eternal presence, not items hoarded for momentary consultation. They don’t think of their method as the embrace of impermanence. They move on from one digital collection to another, but know that the “old” item is always just a click away, not mothballed in a closet or attic.

Which approach is right? As in all evolutionary processes, that question is irrelevant. It’s happening, and it’s happening everywhere and to everyone. While the young have been the vectors of this evolution in the notions of scarcity and possession, the speed of this change is felt by all. A means of judging the extent and impact of this fundamental human shift is simple: consider the importance of wi-fi and smartphones to the middle class anywhere in the world. They have become indispensable commodities for every generation anywhere humans can afford them.  People in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond—not just teenagers and younger adults– now rely on smartphones and the availability of wi-fi as essential components of their lives. Yet smartphones and wi-fi are but two of the vehicles propelling our evolution from collectors to connectors. There are more vehicles to come. And they will not need to be possessed, kept, saved, owned, or collected.  All anyone will need to do is connect.

We have an old tricycle in our house. It belonged to one of us as a small child— years ago and on another continent. It was not even new then. Then it belonged to three others in our house when they were small children—not as many years ago and on three continents.

It is now useless technology, or at least it fits one definition of useless technology encountered during a recent discussion of that topic. A potential definition of the concept is a technology that is vestigial– like a human appendix, it remains, though its usefulness has been obscured by time.

I thought of the tricycle. It’s useless technology, or at least vestigial technology that is useless in its current context, barking shins as it is occasionally bumped into a short, jerky, lonely roll across the floor of the garage.

But when it transported small children racing down hallways or patrolling courtyards, it was useful technology. Unlike many technologies, it never became obsolete. Unlike many technologies, it kept its promises. Unlike many technologies, it did not require maintenance or repair beyond the capabilities of its stewards. Unlike many technologies, it hid no unexpected negative side effects. Unlike many technologies, it could not be compromised to serve the dark side.

It is just a tricycle.

And it’s not even useless. While it no longer carries imaginative, energetic young minds and limbs, it carries plenty of memories. It serves as both a magnet for and repository of recollection, recall, and rejoicing for the happy conveyance it was and remains. For the love it inspired, a love that burnishes it bright beneath its temporary coating of dust.

Our tricycle is vestigial technology right now, yet never will it be useless.