When an Old Friend Calls Out of the Blue

Yes.  Some days a phone call missed is an opportunity gone to the answering machine or as my iPhone likes to designate such calls: Voicemail.  So, I get this call from Chris L. of Great Falls, Montana and being in the act of hunting grouse in Northern Minnesota my iPhone hesitates to ring me and instead sends Chris right to the Voicemail in the Virtual World we now can live in.  When I finish my hunt and enter "tower space' I get a one ringy dingy alert message on my pocket pal letting me know someone has been virtually stored in my Voicemail.  It's so simply done now, so taken for granted now, so common I have a tendency to think of it as trivia.  So.  Are my old friends like Chris trivialized by this marvel of engineering I call an iPhone now? 

I'm not sure how to go on from here.  I'm letting myself just babble here a bit, because I know locked up in that opening paragraph is a theme I want to Blog to death.  I called Chris back tonight and we had a hell of a good time catching up on Life's minutia and grandness along both our paths.  It was inspiring to hear about his life since we parted company in 2005 so I could go farming with Lyn and he could carry on in Great Falls.  Since that departure we have each lost both our parents to the Grim Reaper:  His parents dying traumatically in his presence; mine dying more traditionally normal in a slow dramatic style, one day at a time over the period of a year or so.  Sorry, but becoming an orphan is a non-trivial wake up call no matter how your parents are taken from your life stream.

I'm thinking now about the way it is on the farm.  Our cows are all less than four years old, so pretty prime animals.  Our chickens are of mixed ages, but only one is nearing a long life for a chicken, say five or so years old.  Our dog, Tess, is five.  She has congenital hip dysplasia, but overall acts pretty healthy and rarely shows signs of her rear differential going out.  Our parrots, Luci and Pepper exemplify "one day at a time" and most likely will be found laying on the floor of their cage one of these days, dying out of the sky blue for no apparent reason.  Life and death on the farm are like sunrise and sunset only the certainty of sunset cannot be looked up on my iPhone celestial APP for a specific time of occurrence. 

Where is this going?  Well, I'm bothered by taking things for granted tonight.  Somehow I feel that Things like iPhones, computers or laptops, digital TVs, etc., are reducing life values without us really thinking about it.  They're like devices planted on us to take our mind off of the moment to moment workings of our lives.  I can now travel around the world in seconds retrieving information never before available to me; saving me time, fuel, money, sweat, preparation stress, ...  "Around the World in 80 Days is now possible in an extensive sequence of digital photos and videos in about 8 minutes.  Am I living longer because of these virtual expeditions?  In a way I am, in other ways, I'm not living at all; I'm just seeing and emoting if I can relate in any way to the images coming forth from the virtual world I ask Google to recite to me in images and text and sounds.  We'll know we have arrived when I ask Google what a volcano is and I get an image, the sounds of bubbling magma, the smell of sulfur and the heat of the virtual volcano burns my lungs and hide for being too close. 

Then again, I'd just as soon not arrive then.  Chris was missing his parents tonight.  The intellectual connection he had with his parents was a substantial comfort to him, no less the millions of zillions of other feedbacks he got from his folks.  It made me think of my folks in personal ways just talking to him and as I recall this to write about it, I believe I can smell my parents; each had a distinct odor that was theirs and it became mine to carry with me until my mind gave up it's amazing ability to recall minutia; really, really important minutia.

As I listened to Chris and we commented to each other how good it was to hear each others voices again I have to laugh at the trick our phones were playing on our minds.  Just for a few minutes as we spoke I was sure Chris was really in my earshot, like on the other side of the kitchen table.  I would have been drinking tea with him had he really been there.  He would have been chomping away on one of Lyn's freshly made peanut butter cookies and nursing  coffee I suspect.  And now I sense I'm experiencing double speak in this blog of mine.  But, maybe not.  Maybe this real mind of ours has invented these virtual gadgets to make it easier for us to use our minds all the time and our senses are just obeying our mind and it's creations by being able to experience our fellow minds more constantly and at greater distances than ever before.

Say what?  Now back to you Chet.

Brinkley.