An old man’s winter night

A Times story reporting that college students in a writing course do better when they go offline for a month makes perfect sense to me, same as if you say a writer does better at a laptop in the public library than shnockered on a sailboat in a storm, but the idea of persuading students to go offline strikes me as quixotic, like Amish evangelism or banning the use of chairs. The internet is here and we’re all caught up in it.l was in my 50s when the World Wide Web came in. Its advent was not a big event to me; I was still working on a manual Underwood typewriter. I have a clearer memory of seeing Albert Woolson, the last living Civil War veteran, in a parade in downtown Minneapolis. I remember my uncle Jim farming with horses and Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio. And I remember boredom, which has mostly disappeared in America except perhaps among lighthouse keepers or attendants in parking ramps or felons in solitary confinement. And maybe imprisonment offline would be considered cruel and inhumane in a court of law.Growing up pre-Google in a small Midwestern town among taciturn people, I experienced boredom intensely and it led to reading and in due course to writing. I took up haiku:Three blackbirds shriekingAs my old black cat calmlySquats in the sandpile.This was enough to amuse me back then. And because I could write a 17-syllable haiku and had good handwriting and spoke in complete sentences, I was considered gifted.I considered becoming a poet but I wanted to earn money and not live up over my parents’ garage so I went into public radio where, thank goodness, the audience was made up of reference librarians, caregivers, birdwatchers, organic gardeners, people who were spiritual but not religious, people who enjoyed the enigmatic more than actual entertainment. I shouldn’t brag but I can be more enigmatic than anyone I know.I got a reputation as an artistic storyteller, which, believe me, there is no such thing — storytelling is not an art, it’s a craft, like plumbing, and either the water comes out of the tap or it doesn’t. But back in the Boring Eighties, enigma was more appreciated. And now, there’s the smartphone offering endless entertainment, videos, YouTube, GPS telling you exactly where on Earth you are and how far to the nearest comedy club, yoga studio, liquor store and not just any old liquor store but one that offers designer beer with floral notes of marigolds sprinkled with saffron playing off earthy vanilla with rustic bitterness in the finish. We didn’t have that back in my time, just cold beer.I try to explain this to young people, the fact that we didn’t have soft butter then, butter aerated to make it spreadable, just little hard bricks of butter that when you tried to spread it on toast, you tore the toast apart, or else you scraped shavings of butter off and by the time the toast was buttered it was cold.Back in the day, before “google” became a verb, we had to memorize information, it wasn’t readily available, such as verb tenses or state capitals or the nine planets — My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas — Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto — and a boy named Ralph Krause liked to ask Mr. Jensen our science teacher, How big is Uranus? Is there life on Uranus? It was a high point of science class, in which high points were few and far between.I grew up under the heavy burden of Boy Scouts, which I believe has mostly disappeared, done in by social media. We had cruel Scoutmasters who took us winter camping in the North Woods, believing adversity stimulates intelligence. I’m not so sure. I associate intelligence with staying warm.I look at politics, the regressive MAGA right (working hard to horrify the genteel left), which has elected nihilists in golf pants who exercise their whimsical powers to serve 3% of the people 75% of the time, and it’s easy to despair but if you go offline and wander through crowds of Christmas shoppers, you sense the spirit of kindness and gaiety of our people.Old men dozing off at the switch need to be shoveled into the Home for the Hopeless and let the young and conscientious come in to repair the damage. I hope it happens in my lifetime.

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