Life is a Mystery

My Dad is 84 years old and he doesn't like the computer.  There are too many icons and he finds it quite confusing and frustrating.  I can understand this.  He does like to argue though.  And he likes to get answers to many of the various modern day puzzlements that arise in the course of an average day.  When he can't get an answer from the proper authorities he calls me.  For example, today he called and asked "how come the turkey labeled "fresh" we bought for Thanksgiving had ice in the body cavity?  If they never froze it how did this happen?"  Apparently he wrote a letter to Butterball asking this very same question.  They actually refunded his money, (more than he paid since Mom bought it on one of those spend $300.00 and get a discounted turkey deals),  but offered no explanation for the ice.  Still not satisfied even after making a profit on the deal, he called the 800 number.  I am not making this up.  The earnest, but unlettered customer service rep still could not give him a straight answer.  So he called me.

Being fifty and in the prime of my working life I have a tendency to minimize some of the more urgent matters affecting our senior population. But he is my Pop and I too had bought a fresh brined turkey that had obviously been "frozen" at some point in its journey to my table so I understood his consternation.  "I will Google it Dad, and I will have your answer in a few minutes."
"Really?", he replied.  " I didn't know you could get an answer to something like that."

In the Navy during World War II he showed an aptitude for electronics and math so he was trained as a fire control gunner.  He was the one who used the mechanical computational device to figure trajectories and velocities to aim the big guns at the Nazi airplanes.  I say mechanical computational device because it was basically a glorified abacus, but it weighed 500 lbs and was made of grey steel.

When he was in dental school, I like to remind him, Watson and Crick had not yet discovered the double helix structure of DNA.  Yet he conducted research on the chromosomes of Drosphilus melanogaster (fruit flies). The air powered high speed dental handpiece had not been invented either but they somehow managed to produce dental work that lasted 40 years.  Men also wore fedoras on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

I remember interviewing my grandmother about life in Russia prior to her emigration to the United States in 1905.  Aside from worrying about being raped by the Tsar's Cossacks, she spoke about the first car that drove into her village.  And I remember speaking with my brother-in-law's mother about life in a sod home in  Nebraska when people still traveled by covered wagons.

What does all this have to do with iced up fresh turkeys?  Nothing.  This post is about the parallel trajectory our lives take with technology. We never really think about how drastically our lives change as we adapt to modern life.  We just do it.  My grandmother grew up in a time when most people traveled by horse yet she watched her television as we took our first step on the moon.  As each new innovation came along she incorporated it into her life while her identity remained the same.  At some point she ceased to keep up and for her the black and white television became good enough.  The same barrier has happened to my Dad and the same will happen to you and I.  But in the meantime we subconsciously adapt to the changes until at some point we decide that it isn't worth it.  Why and when that moment arrives has a lot to do, I suspect, with our physical limitations as we age and not any loss in an emotional gusto for life.

As for the iced up fresh turkey you will have to Google it yourself.