One of the most useful things about living more than three-quarters of a century is that you can see the repetition of events. This came home to me as I compared notes with friends on how the FedEx, UPS, and Amazon trucks were wearing a grove in the streets of our neighborhoods. Everything from groceries, to furniture to medication was arriving without anyone darkening a store. It is no wonder some brick and mortar businesses are no longer able to survive. Their customers are all at home on their computers.
But is this entirely new? Not really. Does anyone remember the Sears catalogue? It was the Amazon of its time, with over 300 pages filled with everything from underwear to kits from which one could build a house. Starting as a watch company it grew until it was a staple of American life --- the Wish Book in which both children and adults hopefully circled things they would like as gifts. A woman isolated on a distant farm found the world opened up to her through the catalogue and the postal service. Now those of us who have been isolated by the virus and by the continuing shortages of many items, can go online and find what we want, and often things we did not know we wanted. Amazon is a giant, never-to-be-imagined, wish book with the world at the fingertips of anyone with a computer.
I remember a French phrase I was required to memorize for some unremembered reason when attending a school in Switzerland. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, which means roughly the more things change the more they stay the same. This phrase meant very little to me at ten, but from my current vantage point it rings true. Humanity has gone through so many small and large changes over the years which only repeat themselves, just in a different guise. Most of no longer work on a farm, but we work; ride a horse for transportation, but we drive; or get our news only from reading a paper, but we stay informed. Our food comes under plastic, our clothes from a hanger in a store, and our books sail through the air electronically. Kings are figureheads, and representative government does not mean representing the few.
But that does not mean change is easy, especially for those of us of a certain age. If I have to create one more portal before preforming a task, or press 7 for this and 2 for that while yearning for a real human voice I can understand, I may have a very undignified senior fit.
But that is change, and I hope I can stay limber enough to embrace what comes my way. However, looming in my future is a new-fangled thermostat that comes with a new HVAC system. It can be run (gasp) from my phone. At the look of horror on my face, the salesman rushed to assure me that I could also run it by pressing those comforting buttons on the mechanism itself. In spite of my comments here, what are the chances I will never, ever use my phone to handle this new thing in my life. Stay tuned…