The Week That Was

Blame it on Pee-wee Herman.

Okay, that’s unfair. Pinning it on the gray-suited, red-bowtie-and-white-loafer wearing TV icon associated with childhood. But about a week ago, in advance of “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” a Broadway play currently in rehearsal, there he was on the front page of a New York Times Arts section. My reaction to this piece of the past was perhaps not so unlike what, decades from now, when TV itself may be a relic, the future grandparents among us might experience stumbling upon images of Elmo and Big Bird.

Pee-wee was just part of it. Because, actually, it all probably started a few days before, as I was updating my day planner while waiting in a reception area for an appointment. I’ve been using the same organizing system since the late 70s, when my days in the business world demanded detailed expense accounts and record-keeping.  Though such days are long behind me, Day-Timers, a month-to-month paper planner I can’t imagine doing without, remains. Still a way to keep track of appointments and meetings, it’s expansively morphed over the years into a place for shopping and To Do lists, handy reminders of birthdays and impending deadlines. Not much bigger than a wallet and with its own mechanical pencil, I can carry it with me anywhere.

“Oh, so you’re still doing it the old-fashioned way,” said the young woman sitting across from me and who, until then, had seemed equally focused, tapping into her smart phone.

There was also, the day after that, the discovery in my basement, a subterranean world that gets routinely tidied up and from which things do get carted out and given away but has not had a serious purge, a task my husband Bob and I pledge to tackle over this upcoming winter. Mine was a surveying trip, an assessment of the terrain, as though I were on a field exploration and determining in advance of an archaeological dig what tools or equipment might be required. Behind the seldom-used work bench and the freezer seriously overdue for defrosting, I discovered the wall mounted rotary phone I’d forgotten about, left there 16 years ago by our house's previous owner. To my surprise when I picked it up, I heard a dial tone. Though the phone has never rung with an incoming call, it seemed possible I could call out. Just to see if it worked, I did. Bingo, it got me right to Bob’s office, into, that is, his automated voice mail.

It also bears noting that on the same day, I read Sony will no longer manufacture its tape-based Walkman, the biggest surprise there that Walkmans still existed and were, presumably, until recently and long after the demise of eight-track and its cassette offspring, still being sold somewhere to someone.

And then, too, it was the week of my birthday. Lucky me. But, oh, how fleetingly another year had sped past.

I still don’t know if all this conspired to make me want to lament or defend. Maybe some of each. So here’s the deal.

Yes, a few years ago, I set aside my paper planner and tried a Palm-like device. Diligently I clicked and tapped. I organized my days, entered appointments, all character by character, line by line. Days stretched into weeks. And I tried. But I’m (forgive me, trees) a paper girl. I want to see the whole week or month tangibly spread before me. I want to scribble notes, squeeze nearly indecipherable notes into margins. I like drawing arrows between stuff, making connections. I need to make lists then check off what’s on them, to find satisfaction in applying a fat X over what no longer requires doing or remembering.  I need to turn pages, and if necessary, tear off the corner of one to pocket a note.  

And yes, I have a Blackberry, and gladly use it when I travel or am away from my home office where, by choice, my phone is a land line. Though it bristles with a heap of bells-and-whistles capabilities, my Blackberry is, for me, primarily a phone and a way to get or send e-mails when my laptop isn’t within reach or range. I enjoy the glide of its little cursor, the efficiency of its tiny keyboard. But from it, I get none of the pleasure my body-memory surprisingly experienced in my basement discovery as I waited for each dialed number’s trip around the rotary phone’s wheel, that circular route of pause and connection in which there was time for me to reconsider what I planned to say. And all of it carrying me back to the home of my adolescence with its single phone, to the leap my family took from rotary to push button to, eventually, the pinnacle of technical design, a Princess Trimline.

Not that using such a throwback would be any more successful in my recent attempts, via Blackberry or land line, to get a return call from one of our family’s teen-agers. To connect with him, his mother counsels, best text message or use his Facebook page. Neither of which I’m more likely to do than get in the car and hope to find him at home.

Maybe the fact that it was my birthday gives me a pass. How it and the week’s confluence conspired so that, mea culpa, I indulged, quaffing one too many nostalgia-laced drinks and spending part of a day that might’ve been more productive thinking about some things I missed. Not, you know, the big abstractions. Nor the people who are gone, the places to which I can’t return. 

And not that any such indulgence prevented me from voting in – another of the week’s events – a national mid-term election. Though my vote may have been motivated partly by what is still missing as well as what was and is now missed, I resist believing “our better days” are behind us. Nor am I among what I’m sure are many Chicagoans already thinking in terms of what will be missed when our current long-serving mayor steps down soon and we get a new one, whoever he or she may be. On the island, I can’t join with some islanders who, in missing the “way things were,” may point to the seasonal From Aways or newly retired Year-Rounders for gumming up the works, although I do agree that things would be better if cod once again flourished in the Bay. I also join with those who miss the village-location of the Galley food store and the sort of “Liar’s Bench” out front where old-timers once gathered and shared their stories, the finest kind way to “stay connected.”

Neither here or on the island do I miss dial-up service. I can’t imagine being without high speed Internet access, although I can, if only for a few minutes, miss the clack of typewriter keys on a platen, my hand’s push of a carriage and, in return, its thunk and ding. And how, instead of silently striking “Save,” pulling a page from the roller with a clickety rip.

I love Google and don’t mind much that it, too, like text, has become a verb, but I do miss the way our Encyclopedia Britannica took up an entire shelf. Or the way, before Map Quest, I relied on paper maps and the occasional need to stop and ask for directions. And what about those pull down maps on rollers above a dusty blackboard?

My Canon digital camera is great but it’s also possible – isn’t it? – to miss the whir and hum of an 8 millimeter Brownie movie camera and the requisite, held-aloft blinding spot lights that in old home movies made us resemble headlight-dazed deer on a country road at midnight.       

Also: the clicking, thrumming slide projector in a darkened room.

Overhead projectors instead of Power Point.

Hand written notes instead of e-mail and e-cards.

Running through sprinklers in a neighbor's yard rather than being driven to a playdate.

And Pee-wee.

But surely, he can’t hold as much appeal now. Not without a console TV offering just three networks, each station signing off late at night. Then nothing but snowy test patterns, a persistent single-noted hum, until, in the early morning, with the national anthem blaring, it all jolted back to life. Advancing us forward, ever faster, into another day.