Romance at 80

Remember Helen Trent?  The heroine of a long-running soap opera, she proved "what so many women long to prove...that romance can begin at 35."  I thought of that program recently in connection with the MacBook Air, which proves that romance can begin not only at 35 but at 80.

I first saw it when our computer technician, who had come to help me install a new printer, pulled out his MacBook Air, and I fell in love.  I remembered then a similar sensation when I first saw the Jaguar XK120, a two-seater manufactured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  I was in the American army then, during the aftermath of the Korean War, stationed at Fort Totten, in Bayside, Queens.  Since I had to work staggered shifts, I often had my mornings and afternoons free, when I would travel into Manhattan.  It was there that I first saw that glorious machine, the most beautiful car, in my opinion, ever made.  It combined voluptuously feminine curves with great power (the 120 refers to its maximum speed), very much like the MacBook Air.

I had been toying with the idea of replacing my four or five-year-old PC, whose increasing slowness was beginning to annoy me and whose hard disk was continuing to fill beyond the point that I thought safe.  When I saw the technician's MacBook Air, felt its lightness and imagined the pleasure it would be to travel with it, I decided to buy one.  Our technician returned and installed and formatted it for me, transferring my files from the old computer to the new one.  I'm typing on it now for the first time.

The MacBook Air proved that romance is not dead at 80.  I'm hoping that it will also prove that an 80- has year man can learn a new system.  After all, I've been working on PCs since the 1980s, so its various shortcuts are automatic for me.  Now I hunt for keys that are not there ("page up" for example).  I don't yet know the most elementary commands, such as "print" or "move cursor to the end of the line." I don't yet know how to copy this essay and paste it onto my blog.  Perhaps my 13-year-old grandson will be kind enough to give me a tutorial.  In the meantime, I've learned, to paraphrase Johnson, that while romance has many virtues, it has also many pains.




2010-2012  Anchises-An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved

Veterans Day

Our Shabbat services a few weeks ago recognized Veterans Day, because this year it fell on Friday.  The Star Spangled Banner, God Bless America, America the Beautiful, and My Country ‘tis of Thee replaced some of the traditional melodies, and during a break in the service, our rabbi asked all the veterans who were present to join him at the front of the room. 

There were eight or nine of us.  How ancient, how broken down we appeared.  But then our rabbi asked each of us to give his dates of service and I was astonished to find that I was older than all but two.  So this is what I look like to others, I thought to myself glumly.   I don’t flatter myself that I look younger than I am, but I don’t want to look any older.  As it is, boys and girls as well as men and women volunteer to give me their seats in the subway.

The two oldest veterans served in the Second World War.  One of them, now in his nineties, told me that he participated in five invasions, four in Europe, including Sicily and Normandy, and one in the South Pacific.  In comparison to his service, mine seems laughably unheroic.  I served from 1954 to 1956, in the aftermath of the Korean War, when there was still a draft.  It would pleasant to tell you that I trained as a commando, but nobody would believe me.  No, I trained as a teletype operator, in a course which taught me how to touch type, a skill for which I’ve long been grateful.    Because my score at the end of the course was the highest in the class, I was given a choice of assignments. Alas, all of them were in America, so I chose Fort Totten, a base that dates from the Civil War, in Bayside, Queens.

It turned out to be a plum assignment because, as teletype operators reporting the status of missile batteries along the Atlantic Coast, we had to work shifts – morning, evening, and night – which excused us from kitchen and guard duty.  The night shift had so little traffic that we slept on cots by the teletype machines, and rarely were we disturbed.  We had ample opportunity to go into Manhattan, where as uniformed soldiers we could watch  Broadway plays virtually free, albeit as standees.  Those two years were a time for reflection, for reading, for figuring out what I wanted to do with my life (what I figured out proved to be wrong) and it brought me into contact with men from all walks of life.  It provided a valuable education.

But by no means did those two years represent a high point in my life.  For the oldest veteran in our congregation, in contrast, his service in the armed forces was just that.  This was also true of the other veteran of the Second World War that I’ve known.  He was a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, among the lucky 15% of his cohort from Australia who survived.  Later he went on to a distinguished career as a Supreme Court justice in New South Wales.  When I first met him, on a freighter traveling from Suva to Hong Kong, he pulled out a photo of himself in uniform, standing with two other pilots, in front of a Spitfire.  It was clear that his military service represented for him a supremely important period in his life, a period in which he felt most alive.  I’ve heard the same story from Londoners who survived the Blitz.  The combination of constant danger, camaraderie, and the sense of total enagement in a great cause probably explains the phenomenon.

The Second World War was the last “just war,” the last war in which the whole population mobilized to fight, whether in the armed services or on the home front.  The public willingly made sacrifices in pursuit of this great common purpose.  America is so polarized now, its representatives in Congress so deadlocked, that a common purpose seems far away.  Do we need a great war to foster a sense of common purpose?  One would think that the dangers posed by global warming, our crumbling infrastructure, our second-rate educational system, and the government deficit would provide such a purpose, but thus far it has not emerged and no leader has yet  been able to generate one.  To be told to go shopping, as President Obama’s predecessor advised us, won’t cut it.

2010-2011 Anchises - An Old Man's Journal All Rights Reserved