Another Day in the Country
Needing to be needed
© Another Day in the Country
Obsolescence plagues most anyone older than 65. Progress, change, and invention are constant while time moves ever forward. I’m sure that any of you reading this column can remember items from your past that you loved using and are no longer available.
I love using a small style of serving tongs about eight inches long. I have several pairs, and I’m constantly on the lookout for more, but it’s futile. They just don’t make them anymore.
Evidently, not enough people considered them essential. They aren’t flashy. They are simple, just the right size for picking up anything from chops to lettuce, a single piece or a whole bunch. But can you find them? No.
It’s been 20 years since we built my mother’s new house in Ramona, and I can remember her looking with dismay at the array of new cooktops available.
She reminded us that she’d learned to cook on a wood stove and now she was confronted by a framed sheet of glass.
“Can I at least get knobs instead of black buttons?” she wanted to know.
It was daunting.
When my daughter was visiting last summer, she asked, “How old are those phones you guys have?” as she whipped out the latest model iPhone. “I just love this one. You should get new ones while we’re here, and we can help you.”
“Sure, let’s do it,” my sister chimed in, “now, before we lose our nerve.”
And just like that we were on our way to Manhattan. Several hours later, with two relatives and two consultants to supposedly get us two free upgraded phones, we had a bill of almost $500 and two pieces of machinery that we hadn’t the foggiest idea what to do with.
There were more upgrades and gadgets than we’d ever figure out how to use.
Jana, living a couple of thousand miles away, certainly felt needed; but she hadn’t a clue as to how much assistance this adjustment required for us, nor did she know the duration of our dilemma. We’re still asking questions.
At some point, we just stopped asking for more info because it made us feel so utterly inadequate.
While the world of accumulated knowledge moves on, I’m standing here with a storage shed full of knowledge that’s become obsolete. Does anyone really need to know what I know?
No one I know of wants to know how to make cottage cheese, for instance. Very few people I know make their own ice cream let alone grow their own cabbage to make their own sauerkraut.
I can remember the day — not all that long ago, but it’s been at least 20 years — when Tooltime Tim’s mom tried to teach me, the mostly vegetarian, how to butcher a chicken. She could catch, kill, clean, chop up, and have a chicken frying in record time.
We had a yard full of straight-run semi-adult chickens that were mostly roosters, and something had to be done.
Tim was just trying to help when he offered his mother’s expertise; but it was not a skill I was ever going to perfect. I could no more kill a chicken than I could butcher a steer — that and more, not available in my skill set.
In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure that I even wanted to know how to do it.
My elementary school kids (who really belong to some of you) were painting cherries in art class this week.
Did they know that cherries can be different colors, that some are sweet and some are sour? Did these kids even know that cherries grew on trees? Did their mothers make them cherry pie?
“How many of you have ever picked cherries?” I wanted to know.
“Does a cherry bush count?” asked one of the two or three kids who had raised their hands to affirm cherry picking.
Would you believe that when I went to the market they had bing cherries for sale? I bought a small bag, brought them home, washed them, and took them to class this week so the kids could see a cherry that had been picked from a tree.
Of course, I had to explain that cherry season normally is in the spring, and these particular cherries had probably been in cold storage for months and no longer tasted like a bing cherry freshly picked from a tree, but it was the best I could do in January, in Kansas, in the middle of winter with snowdrifts in the yard.
Such a simple thing but, I felt, so needed. Who’s going to tell these computer-savvy, game-playing kids with such quick thumbs about cherry picking, pear seeds, Baltimore orioles, and famous Indian chiefs other than me?
A few of us left still love making cherry kolaches and cherry pies and homemade ice cream and growing peas just for picking, podding, and eating right there in the garden.
My garden may never provide my sustenance, but I want you to know it feeds my soul just to feel the warmth in the soil and see the tenderness of sprouts peaking above the ground — not available this time of year, of course, but before you know it.
I admit it: I love being needed, even though it gets harder and harder for me to figure out whether what I have to offer is necessary.
Maybe it’s enough just that I know that someone needs to know what I know even if they don’t know it.
That’s true for all of us, as we spend another day in the country.