Patience And Phenomenal

There are two words that can influence your life now and for the future.  My dear friend in Steilacoom, Washington tells me, I must have patience in waiting for my sore knee to heal and to be able to once again ballroom dance. His name is Steven Behr, Sr. and he and I have connected, as the kids say, via the email. What a wonderful invention email is. Of course, the e in email stands for Elita. Ha. I am giving myself credit for its name. It stands for electronic email or we could add extraordinary mail or exceptional mail or express mail or finally exhilarating mail. Whatever name you want to assign to it, let it be at your pleasure. When one had to correspond with others, they had to sit down and take a piece of paper and write a note, put a stamp on the envelope and walk or drive to the mail box. Possibly, he or she could use the phone to call. I remember back in the Middle Ages when I was a teen, my brother and sister-in-law had moved for his job to Springfield, Illinois. That was quite far away and my mom was extremely upset when they moved. She even had a heart attack that day and was in the hospital for a week or more. It made my brother feel bad, because he was there and she was here. On every other Sunday at dinner time, they would call us. On the other Sunday, they would call my sister-in-law’s parents and the two sets of parents would call each other to tell them how the young couple and infant baby were doing. The phone would ring in advance of the call, a long shrill ring and you knew that a long distance call was coming to you in a very few minutes. You were quite excited to receive a long distance call and they were quite expensive too. Look how things have advanced since about 1955, we can dial immediately on our cellphones, no warning signal ahead of time for the call, we can email and the person on the other end gets it in about ten seconds way across the country, we can text and they get it in seconds. Wow, what progress and I feel that sometimes we must have lived in the Middle Ages. You can go to Google and find long lost relatives, friends, coworkers or even old boyfriends or girlfriends. You can go to Google and find old classmates, the accomplishments of old friends and relatives and you can even Google your own name and find things about yourself you may be proud of or not want them related to strangers. I Googled in the name of an old boyfriend (he is surely old like me too) and found six men named his name. I scrolled down and found him, by some things it said about him that I knew from the old days when we dated. It was interesting to see he is retired (I guess) to Florida and I am glad we never married. He had he had not been too successful in his workplace life. I am sure most of the facts are true. Another boyfriend, I Googled said he had a career as a big-time physician and had even invented some type of medical procedure. Wow, I would have been the spouse of an inventor. I Googled in for some information on former high school class mates. Some were my friends and anything I saw about them that was great, I was proud to have known them in their teen years. If I saw something not so great, if I had liked them then, then I was sad for their missed opportunities or bad health. If I did not like them, I was not happy they had not succeeded; I really did not care about them especially if they were not pleasant folks back then. Email brings us closer to new and old acquaintances and Google finds us facts about strangers, friends or relatives. Google has become a word and will I presume be in the dictionary like words like chutzpah meaning gall or guts and maven meaning an expert. Words become a part of a language in many ways. So when and it may be there already, Google will probably mean to move around and find information, to search for data about everything or just plain old mean to discover lots of information, hopefully valid in an instant. When we Google, we are I guess, using our brains to find information we need. When I was in school, if you were not wealthy enough to own a set of Britannica encyclopedias, around fifty were in a set, you had to get your data from the free library about six blocks away. So we kept in good physical health by walking to the library, to the doctor, to the dentist and to the movie theaters. We owned one comprehensive encyclopedia and we felt rich having that one. However, it was not large enough or full enough with information that we needed; so therefore, the trek to the public library. You could not take out for home use their encyclopedia; you had to copy down the information in your notebook to use later at home. So patience was involved there because when you got there to the library, fifteen others were there to do the same things. You sat there and waited your turn and finally after patience, you were rewarded to use the books and someone was waiting for you to be finished too. Patience is involved when you go to the doctor or dentist. It seems they book two every fifteen minutes and you wind up waiting sometimes an hour. I heard a patient waiting for the medical person mumble “I guess my time is not as important as his time. I have been waiting for one hour.” She was just getting ready to tell the receptionist, she was leaving, when they called her name. Patience is involved while waiting in the cashier’s line at the local market where the person in front of you has seventy-five coupons to be scanned, where they are talking on the cellphone while unloading the seventy-five coupons and then they have to write a check to pay for their purchases and start to do their bookkeeping in their checkbook while you are getting really impatient. Once the line was held up because the customer questioned that the item should be ten cents lower than the register listed. They had to wait for the manager to check it out and the line grew to about fifteen. One customer said to her “you have nerve making this line wait for ten cents, here is a dime and let us go. “She told him where to go and would not take his dime. Patience is waiting to learn to ballroom dance in such an excellent manner, that you feel like you are Ginger Rogers and your partner is Fred Astaire. It takes a lot of patience to accomplish that feat. Patience is waiting for your wedding day to happen, for your baby to be born, a long nine months and for you to receive a degree in your college studies. Patience can be anything you feel impatience about and want to happen now. Patience is endurance, staying power and Longfellow said “patience is life-long martyrdom.”Lyman Abbott said patience is “passion tamed.” So to my dear Steven Behr, Sr., I will be patient because you are my devoted friend from Washington State and knowing you thinking I can be patient, will make me patient. Patience means endurance and perseverance and that I am. I persevere in everything I want to happen and always did. Since I know you through the beloved invention called email, I can make more things happen than ever. All of these things will make me a finer person and one who still continues at being an active adult and years away from the eighties. I love my email and for the new friends, who I love too, made from using it. Bravo to email, to computers and to being a patient and phenomenal person because you tell me that often. You are one yourself who are those two words too. elita sohmer clayman Fairfax Station Patch