THE PUBLIC FORUM
4
The Arlington Times • The Marysville Globe
March 28, 2012
Counting my blessings
I
wept in the car when I left the Marysville Food Bank. In the passenger GUEST seat, my friend didn’t interOPINION rupt, certain I had no immeJ.R. NAKKEN diate reason for unhappy tears. And she was right, of course. I was crying for joy. What thought had I ever given to our local food bank? Yes, I had put a can of something from my grocery bags into the barrel at the store when it was manned (usually womanned) and its sentry asked me to do so. Stuff from my pantry shelves, mostly esoteric and unused for months since purchase, went to a girlfriend’s annual drive at her office. A can or two went to the local casino’s outreach, when it offered five bucks free play for each donation. My visual concept was, I fear, of the downtrodden and homeless being handed bunches of wilted carrots by dour do-gooder clerks. I was in for a surprise, and challenge you to take a walk through the lines at 6518 60th Drive NE. The desk clerk who verified my friend’s eligibility and issued the wooden token that added federal commodities to her choices was more courteous than the receptionist at my beauty shop. A smiling volunteer handles the cart for each shopper, many of whom are elders. He/she explains the choices, does the reaching and lifting and keeps the lines moving. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this week’s federal commodities were Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and an off brand of creamed corn. Her cart soon filled with frozen meats, cheese, eggs, produce and canned goods, mostly donations from local businesses. (Another volunteer told me that the grocery/department store where I shop had just given them $18,000 to replace a freezer.) She scored a bag of dinner rolls from the huge bread selection, delighted to have something to take to a mid-week potluck. I made a silent vow to put something worthwhile in the donation barrel each trip to the store. So, why was I weeping? Counting my blessings caused some of the flood. But it began at the next-to-last stop of my friend’s cart. “Do you need cat food?” asked the volunteer. Many single elders have only their pets for companions, and I was touched by this outreach. Then, at the door, the happy man who wheeled our cart and unloaded our groceries was also distributing from a case of egg dyes and a pile of colorful plastic baskets. The children of young families who are food-bank eligible would not be without a back yard egg hunt, and these items were not surplus. It was two weeks before Easter. Our food bank and its generous suppliers seem to know that man does not live by bread alone. J.R. Nakken is a writer who lives on Tulalip. THE MARYSVILLE
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An open letter to grandchildren
A
s your moms and dads know all too well, each generation thinks up ways to break loose and invents styles and behaviors to artfully annoy parents. I know because I’ve been there and done that. And then you try the hyper-private thing. A parent asks, “Where are you going?” You say, “Out.” “Who will you be with?” “Some of the guys.” “When will you be back?” “After a while.” Good parents do manage to wring a few particulars from tightmouthed sons but it takes work. Daughters are another issue. Luckily it’s a phase that, for most kids, passes. In some ways, kids of the 13th Century had it easy. Aside from starvation, disease, pillage and plunder, hundreds of years went by without much change to their neighborhoods. Generations cycled through the same houses, doing the same things, working at the same jobs with the same tools. One year was pretty much the same as the next. Not so these days. I grew up with a technology that any thinking person could tinker with. When my car’s engine sputtered in a particular way, I loosened the screw securing the distributor. After turning it a couple of degrees one way I tightened it and fired it up. If it backfired and chugged fitfully, I turned it a bit the other way. Chances were that fixed it. Trial and error. When the TV picture went bonkers I pulled vacuum tubes from its chassis (think motherboard) and socketed them into a tube-tester at the hardware store. When the tester’s needle didn’t swing into the green, a tube needed to be replaced. Vacuum tubes made sense. Some had plates inside to hold electric charges. A signal from an antenna was amplified onto the plate so that
OPINION
BOB GRAEF
electrons wandering by could be regulated like cars in a regulated onramp. If handled right, the electron stream was readied to do something useful and that’s pretty much why cathode rays splattered black and white images onto TV screens. No mystery. Other faulty bits of early radios and TVs could be cut out and new ones soldered in. Parts were big enough for pliers or soldering irons. A little training and a person could follow a circuit like a road map, seeing how resistors and capacitors and tubes did their work to turn broadcast signals into intelligent sounds and pictures. It made visual sense. That was then. This is now. People who grew up in that bygone era were smart in a way that fit technology that could actually be repaired. So we had radio and TV repair shops in most neighborhoods and car repair was done at the local service station. When simpler gadgets malfunctioned, they were taken apart on the kitchen table. And fixed. Nowadays, car problems are diagnosed with analyzers that even tell which tire is low. Whatever happens inside a smart phone is totally incomprehensible. You don’t fix them. You throw them away and get another. TV repairmen don’t really fix anything anymore. They unplug components, toss them out and plug in new modules. That’ll be $300 plus tax please. Kids have no idea what goes on in today’s phones, computers or e-readers nor do they get hung up by needing to know. Having grown up with mysterious gadgetry, they don’t
question the leaps of faith it takes to accept whatever goes on inside. They can do that. I can’t. I’m not totally comfortable trusting black boxes full of sub-microscopic secrets and that’s my excuse for not getting my mind around computer issues and stuff like programming new TV sets. What does that make me? Obsolete, antiquated, outmoded and dated. Guilty as charged. The grandkids see me struggle to fix things that, in their world, would be in the bottom of the garbage can. They watch me with wonder, like anthropologists watching apes probe termite mounds with sticks. Look, they say, he’s learned to use tools! That archaic way of dealing with things grew from necessity. Because television sets were notorious for jumpy images that rolled up or down screens, a lot of time was spent fiddling with Vertical and Horizontal Hold knobs or doing the tube-test thing. Cars ran okay most of the time, but parts weren’t made to today’s exacting tolerances so they needed a lot of fixing during lives that fell short of 100,000 miles. In fact it was a rare odometer that could even register beyond 100,000. Aging cars, a.k.a. rust-buckets, jalopies or rattle-traps, were teenagers’ schools for automotive technology. Tearing a motor apart to replace rings and whatever was an important step toward manhood, a rite of passage. No auto-shop class needed. No computers, no black-boxes. Just a few of crescent and end wrenches and a couple of screwdrivers. That’s the way my mind still works. Give me something observable to deal with and I’ll handle it. But give me a black box of mysteries all covered with push-buttons and I’ll pass it off to a grandson or granddaughter as quick as I can. Comments may be addressed to robertgraef@comcast.net.