Sorry About That, Doctor

I am drowning in technology.

I have a Macbook Air, an iPod Nano and iPod Touch, a PDA, a mobile Hot Spot, an e-book reader, and a Smartphone. When I get all my electronic gear on and running the lights dim in nearby houses and small birds fall out of the sky.

Now these devices have learned to multi-task. A phone doesn’t just make phone calls. It is a camera as well. It can take pictures and then send them by e-mail or with a text message.

The worst has happened. The Smartphone thinks it is smarter than I am.

This phone tries to guess who you are calling and dial it with just a few keystrokes. That’s not only the numbers you have entered as Speed-dial, but any number in your address book. It isn’t totally accurate. Sometimes it dials people you don’t mean to call.

I am staying at McGaw Care Center on Chicago’s North Shore, recovering from pneumonia. I see a doctor here, one I just met. At 11 p.m. one night I wanted to call my daughter. When I typed the first two letters of my daughter’s name the phone showed a list of names that begin with those letters. My daughter was on the list. So was the doctor.

While I watched helplessly the phone began dialing the doctor’s number. It started to ring, Someone answered the phone. I quickly hung up.

There was a brief silence. Then, to my horror, the phone called him again. I hung up. There was another short silence. Then my phone rang. The doctor was returning my call.

What do you say to a doctor you have called for no reason late at night? I didn’t answer the phone.

I am looking for a telephone that makes and receives phone calls. I don’t want it to do anything else. I want a phone with no skills, no talent, and absolutely no memory. You have to push buttons for the numbers you call.

I know there used to be phones like this. I have seen them in old movies.

A Little Lauhgter Makes Life Better

Every year Carle Clinic, a local medical provider, sponsors a gathering of cancer survivors. It doesn’t sound like a very cheery group, so until this year I never attended. The first thing that surprised me was the sheer number of survivors. They filled the hall of a large convention center. Clearly a lot of people survive cancer.

The second surprise was the speaker. She has survived cancer not once but twice. In between she found time to serve a term as lieutenant governor of the state. It was a good talk, encouraging and good humored. After she spoke someone in the audience asked if she had considered running for governor.

Her reply was “No. I don’t like prisons.”

Anyone who can keep a sense of humor after experiencing both cancer and Illinois politics is a genuine survivor. There are some things we can change and should. There are others we must simply endure. It is easy to accept them sadly. It is better to laugh.

Shakespeare wrote, “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: … and one man in his time plays many parts.” One of those roles is surely that of the clown. There is something inescapably ridiculous about all of us.

Hitler and Stalin and the beloved leader strut and preen in their brief moments on stage. The suffering they cause is not funny. In the end they are as dead as their victims, and unlike the victims they are not honored. From a distance they are simply absurd. They are funny little men whose pretensions came to nothing.
There must be laughter in heaven about the people we idolize as celebrities. Famous now, they are half way to being forgotten while the headlines are still fresh. Trailing their cloud of paparazzi, they soon stumble off the stage of history.

There is a lot to laugh at, but not all laughter is healthy. A joke can be disguised anger. Humor that humiliates and is hurtful has turned malignant. No good can come of it.

Humor is at its best when we laugh at our self. After all, that is one joke we know better than anyone else.

Religion and Faith

I recently read a novel that consisted entirely of letters between the characters in the story. It is a device used effectively by other writers. C. S. Lewis framed at least two of his books this way. Done well it makes the characters come to life, each speaking in his own way. It makes the story personal.

After reading the book, I realized that I haven’t written or read a real letter for years. I mean a personal letter that takes time to read and even more time to write. I still get mail of course, but most of it includes the phrase “Payment due.” The rest is bulk mailing to thousands of people. It reveals nothing about the sender or the reader.

I get messages, but a lot of them come in shorts gasps of glyphs and abbreviations, crammed into Twitter’s 140 character rule. Text messages are short because hunting and pecking one letter at a time exhausts our patience. Facebook allows a little more space, but not much. Besides, how much do you want displayed for everyone to see?

The closest thing to actual feelings in email is the emoticon, those smiley or frowning faces composed from abused type symbols. The main message of an emoticon is “See how cute I am.” Real letters don’t do cute.

The result of our brevity is that most of our correspondence is flat, unappealing. Our communication is like an exhausted marathon runner, gasping to get out a few words. If I have anything important to say, this isn’t the way I want to say it.

A personal letter sounds like the person who wrote it. It hasn’t been proof-read and polished and buffed into boring perfection. It isn’t afraid to waste words. It may meander, impulsively wandering into thoughts that are later abandoned. It is half a conversation, not a recital.

The difference between religion and faith is like the difference between Facebook and a personal letter. Facebook is a message to whoever is browsing by. A letter involves two people: one writer and one reader. Religion is a topic anyone can study. Faith is a relationship between God and one person.