How I Spent My Morning in a "Way Back Machine"

“What’s wrong with playing video games?” he asked, not me specifically, as he was just thinking aloud, you know, kind of surmising. Someone had posed the question to him. He had given it some thought and apparently couldn’t think of anything particularly harmful in spending his time in such a manner.

“…spending his time…” those are my words and it makes me think of a huge bank that each of us has, except that we’ve no way of knowing the total amount that is in our “time bank,” so in that sense, wasting this valued commodity might be, at the very least, a darn shame if not actually harmful per se. But, who is to judge what is “wasteful” about how one uses their time? Certainly not me.

***

In Werner Herzog's “Into the Abyss” (a documentary on the death penalty) I was moved by ex-executioner Fred Allen’s explanation of living “your dash.” Your dash life, he explains, is the little line on your headstone, the one between your date of birth and the date that you die, that’s your “dash,” that’s your whole life. “How you gonna live your dash?” Mr. Allen asks?

I know how exactly how I want to live my dash.

***

I will be baking a birthday cake today. It will, hopefully, be a perfect knock off of Portillo’s famous and much loved chocolate cake, only I will make mine from scratch and not use the cake mix or Betty Crocker’s pre-made frosting recommended by online Portillo-cake-experts. After I make the cake and frosting, and after Reliable Husband and I make a quick trip to  buy some last minute birthday gift wrap, I will begin work on a “spaghetti sauce” recipe that belonged to the birthday person’s dear departed mother. Spaghetti, along with this treasured meat sauce, some garlic bread and salad, followed by the cake and tall glasses of cold milk with be the celebratory meal of Reliable Husband, me, the birthday person and his immediate family. We will sing “Happy Birthday.” Our birthday person will blow out the candles and open his gifts. And the event will become part of my “dash."

***

The New Yorker periodical did some kind of mathematical measurement of how long readers spent reading the magazine’s top stories. The most popular story in 2015 occupied its readers for 3.6 billions seconds, or “roughly a hundred and fifteen years.” A portion of that was part of my dash.

***

My morning was pleasantly interrupted by a FaceTime call from my just-turned-two-years grandson. He wanted to show me his new Thomas the Train mini tracks. He and I will play with them this Sunday when we travel to his home for Super Bowl Sunday festivities. This will be yet another sweet portion of my dash.

***

I try to keep my physical body in a good state of health, not just my heart and muscles, but also my gray matter, and no, I don't mean my hair, but my brain. Each morning I do the NYTimes crossword puzzle or sudoku or such. Lately a couple of times per week, when I’m not too terribly busy, I will do the online jigsaw puzzle from the New Yorker Magazine. The puzzle is a randomly generated copy of one of the covers from their magazine archives, anywhere from 1925 to present. After I complete the puzzle, which takes me anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes, they invite me to take a look at the actual magazine. And it is as though I have entered a time machine to the past.

Today I visited New York in March of 1958. I would have been just shy of 6 years old back then. I first look at each page, pausing only to read the editorial cartoons and glance at the advertising, you know trying to get a feel for the era. Then I go back and read the fiction. March 1, 1958's excellent pieces were “Tebic” by Sylvia Townsend Warner and “The Bella Lingua” by John Cheever. I make a note to look up more by Townsend Warner, who is new to me.

While I view the magazine I think of my mother and Reliable Husband’s mother. What was is like to be a young woman, parent in 1958? "West Side Story" was a major play on Broadway, along with the Elia Kazan directed, “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.” The current cinema was “Around the World in 80 Days” and “Bridge Over River Kwai."

The “From Paris” column featured an interesting story on the Roman Catholic "miracle" of Bernadette’s vision at Lourdes. The column contained the humorous quote, “Doctors today say that in a way it is miraculous that… the water… in which hundreds of sick pilgrims are immersed… has never given rise to an epidemic."

This issue features ads for airlines, automobiles, liquor, furniture, at least four different raincoat ads (must rain a lot in March in NY), and a Germine Monteil “Super Royal” lipstick that contains royal jelly and features a “click-in, click-out” cartridge for replacing lipstick sticks. Everything seems so disposable now, throw-away. And so many of these companies have gone out of business.

Just before I finish reading this issue I spot an ad from "White Flower Farm." I, now, often order plants for my Privatopia garden from a place by the same name. I take note of their address which is in Litchfield, Connecticut. I look at a recent email from my White Flower Farm and I’ll be darned, they are located in Litchfield, CT and have been “Plantsmen Since 1950.” Good for them! This will be filed in my brain for the next time I’m shopping for plants, if they have what I want I’ll go to them even if I find it is not the most economical price. That’s me, that’s my dash. (More on this topic soon? Perhaps. Tune in again to see what develops.)

my "way-back machine"

tiny White Flower Farm ad right next to the full-page, four-color Canadian whisky ad

his mother's handwriting is nearly identical to my mother's
and the recipe eerily resembles a recipe
 belonging to the mother of a boyfriend-before-Reliable-Husband