O Pioneers!

So I’m doin’ my blog thing one night and the power goes out.  Pitch black. The only light: the eerie glow from my laptop screen.  It’s an anemic light, suited perfectly for its purpose, but hardly enough to take on any extra duty, like illuminating my keyboard.  I’m staring down into a dull pool of indistinguishable black Chiclets. 

I have plenty of flashlights in the house but I don’t have plenty of batteries, good ones anyway.  I do however have an emergency flashlight/radio that you wind up but that’s in the attic. 

I fumble my way to the kitchen and to the strip of hooks on the wall where we all hang our keys and then, with the help of the little laser beamer thingy I have on my keychain, make my way to the foyer and up the stairs to the second floor, and up the stairs again. 

I crank the thing up a good hundred turns or so and punch the button.  It’s a good, bright light.  White, almost blue, like a gas flame.  Like the xenon headlights you see on newer cars.  I spend the next half hour trying to position the thing: on the desk, on the printer, which is a little higher, in my mouth!  But no matter where I put the thing, the line of light never quite hits the mark.  I could hold it in one hand and type with the other but I might as well take a chisel and hammer to a stone slab.  Rube Goldberg would have been proud: a stool, several books, a Tupperware container later, and I have the flashlight just the right height and angle.  And that’s when the power comes back on.  I have mixed emotions.  All that creative energy wasted.

Every time this happens I am reminded of a television show, actually a rash of shows way back — the dawn of reality shows, where they took a modern family, or as my mother would say,  “mah-dren” family, stripped them of all their fancy-schmantzy washing machines and eight track players and sent them to live on an Amish farm in Ohio … in the winter.  The idea was to see if these twentieth century sissies could survive in the world of our pioneer ancestors.  Ain’tcha heard?  We’re all fat and lazy and we don’t eat right and we don’t exercise and we spend all our time in front of the TV watching  “Maury.”

In the 1920s, while chopping wood on a farm in Utah, a young boy, Philo T. Farnsworth, had a vision:  something so profound as to forever change the world as we knew it.  A revelation to rival Saint John’s!  A real crystal ball. 

Sure, we’re fat and lazy and we spend too much time drooling over Sarah Lee Cheesecake commercials flickering out of the great hypnotic eye we call television, but dumpin’ on my boy P.T.?  That ain’t cool.  You can’t blame technology for your fat ass while you’re filling out the Medicare forms to order your Hoveround with the  “wide load” seat option.   C’mon!  Our babies don’t die an hour after they’re born, nor do their mothers, and deaths by toothache?  Way, way down.  A handful of penicillin and a foot’s worth of dental floss have added more years to our lives than a thousand miles of running and a million pounds of broccoli. 

That family  “sent back a hundred years,” braving the cruel Ohio winter without their Wii will find a way to muddle through somehow.  However, take a family from a hundred years ago and drop them in today’s world? 

They’d be dead in a week.

But not because living today is harder than living a hundred years ago or living a hundred years ago is harder than living today.  Or because our ancestors were tougher than we are.  Or because we’re tougher than they were.  It’s because living, just plain living, in any time, is always hard.  Chopping wood doesn’t make you tough.  Adding fabric softener to the rinse cycle in your washing machine doesn’t make you soft. 

He was one of us, this  “mah-dren” man, born six years into a new century, this man who made us all fat an lazy, this man who took the great big world and crumpled it up in a ball the size of an orange.  This man who showed us, in real time, what Joe McCarthy was really made of.  And the “welcome wagon” waiting for the Freedom Riders in Alabama.  And J.F.K. Jr. saluting his father’s coffin as it passed him and his family by.  And a man playing golf on the moon. And The Vietnam War.  I don’t know about you but I’ll trade a couple of love handles and a half dozen cretins down the  “Jersey Shore” for that other stuff any day.

The vision of that simple farm boy was so extraordinary, so fascinating, so spectacular that nearly a hundred years later the novelty still hasn’t worn off.  And maybe it never will.  After all, what can compete with the universal keyhole?  But we’ve survived the wheel, and gunpowder, and the car, and the telephone,  and the airplane,  and those sticky strippy things we put on our noses at night to stop snoring and I think we’ll survive this one too.  We just have to keep it all in perspective.  The day they started making television sets they didn’t stop growing broccoli.  President Truman didn’t sign an executive order mandating we all take the elevator instead of the stairs. 

We’re the same people today we were that day, a million years ago when we first stood up for ourselves.  I have faith in us.  We can beat this thing!  Get off your ass,  America!  Walk to the Produce Junction and forage — the  “mah-dren” way.  And when you get back home, park it on the couch, shine up one of those bright red apples on the front of your shirt and reach for the remote :

“In the case of baby Leonardo … You ARE the father!”