Monthly Archives: May 2012

Voices in the Air

15 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Cell phones, climate, Meditation, Mindfulness, Seasons, Weather

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When we were young, my older brother had this little do-it-yourself radio kit he liked to play with. It seemed to me to consist of nothing more than a few wires he strung up on Mom’s clothesline and some dials in a box. He would work at it all afternoon and finally pick up some faint music or someone talking vaguely from the distance. This was the early 1960s, the idea of radio flowing into our ears from multiple personal devices was off in the future: I was mystified by how he could be receiving anything with these wires and knobs. He attempted several ways to explain it to me, but finally condensed it into the only soundbite I recall from his lecture: there are voices in the air, and I’m trying to catch them.

How far we’ve come from this fascination with radio, or with long-distance communication. Now, what was a mystery has become a daily necessity. My daughter dropped her cell phone in the toilet at school the other day. Back home, she asked for rice to nestle it in, there being a rumor that this fixes a phone that has been dropped in the toilet, which, almost inconceivably to me, must be a common problem. Our pantry was not well stocked with rice at the crucial moment, which she took as an obvious sign of bad parenting and let us know about it. She immediately began to plead for a replacement telephone, asserting that each moment she had to spend without it also indicated our lack of parenting skill or concern.

Here’s the thing: I do not have, and I do not use, a cell phone. I’m not sure why, but I think I would rather lose a limb than carry a little telephone around with me all the time. I am fond of Garrison Keillor’s observation that ‘a cell phone makes a man a receptionist.’ I don’t want to be a receptionist. When I leave work, when I am alone, when I should have some quiet time amid a hectic day, I cherish that quiet time. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to hear from you in those moments. I want to listen to Dvorak’s Serenade in A. I want to think about the next chapter of my book. I don’t want a text message telling me that you are driving home in traffic, that you are buying mangoes, that your favorite ballplayer got a hit. Good for you, but I don’t care.

Another blogger whose posts I enjoy reading (emptychalice.com) wrote recently about taking a Spirit Walk: just walking down the street for a distance in silence and being attentive to little things all around. He described the experience as being, in his elegant phrase, ‘a luxury of time.’ How little we do such things! We grow frantic in any moment spent without an electronic interface, some media washing over us, some communication on our devices. My daughter, after a few days of not having her telephone, was livid, stressed and distraught. ‘My life,’ she screamed, with no hint of irony, ‘is on my phone!’ I was embarrassed for both of us. This, more than anything she could have accused me of, made me feel like a bad parent.

When I am writing about the seasons, I am aware that modern life removes us ever more thoroughly from any meaningful interface with them. There are people who get into their cars in the garage, drive to work and park in an indoor parking lot, take the elevator up to their office, and then repeat the whole sequence in reverse, arriving back home to an evening of television without ever setting foot outside. It may be the dead of winter or burning hot summer, but it scarcely matters. We don’t experience it physically, and we keep our minds clogged with ephemera and trivia pumped into us constantly via assorted electronica.

I practice yoga every morning, and have done so for years. Someone asked me the other day if I also meditate, the two being linked in the popular imagination. No, I said, it has been years since I could clear my mind. And it’s true. I am always thinking about things, whether those things are worth a second’s thought or not. I can’t stop. I would like to have the ‘luxury of time,’ I would love to hear if the universe means to tell me anything. There are voices in the air, but we don’t need a kit to capture them. The voices we should be listening for can’t be captured, and most of what we receive is interference and background noise which it gets harder every day to filter out.

Iced Water!

03 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in Arabs, Beverages, climate, Coffee, England, Seasons, Tea, Toast, Weather

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The other night my wife and I met with two real estate agents in our home. After we had shown them around the house for an hour, listening to them yammer endlessly about how we should stage our home for sale, we sat down at the kitchen table to talk about pricing, financing and more. My wife offered them a glass of water, and brought them both large tumblers full of tap water, no ice. Neither of the agents touched the water.

It’s not completely her fault. My wife was born in Hungary, and only came to the U.S. as an adult, and she has not adjusted to the American partiality for ice water. I will say she has had plenty of time and advice. Over the years I have tried mightily to teach her about ice water. I have even detailed the ‘recipe’ for this peculiarly Yankee beverage a number of times: take a large glass; fill it as full as possible with ice cubes; add as much water as you can. Replenish as needed with more ice.

I recall a scene in a Masterpiece Theater presentation back in the eighties, Paradise Postponed it was called, and one of the English characters had just visited the States. How was it? she was asked. ‘Horrid,’ she replied (or something of that sort), ‘everyone drinking iced water. It makes one’s teeth hurt to think about.’ I understand that there is curiosity ranging from the bemused to the censorious, even a sort of revulsion in other nations about heavily iced drinks, especially water. When I visit my wife’s family in Hungary, yea though it is August and the sun doth beat down on my back, ice is hard to come by. They keep one little ice cube tray in their freezer, it holds like a half-dozen cubes, and from this they stingily chisel out one or two and drop them in my glass; it’s as if I had asked for dead frogs in my drink, and though they are willing to oblige a guest, they’re not going to put in too many.

My favorite drink in all the world is ice water. I live in St. Louis County, here where summer temperatures run above 90 degrees most of the time, and the humidity can sap all your energy in an hour or two. It’s like this in much of the United States, and that may explain why it is that we so love our iced beverages. I think people in many climates have food or beverage preferences that come about due to climatic or seasonal conditions: and I’m not talking about people in Japan eating fish, or Eskimos surviving on raw narwhal.

The great food writer John Thorne, in his book Pot on the Fire, wrote about several foodstuffs that are both simple and way more complex than we think. He had a long chapter on steamed rice. He had a chapter on toast. Toast, he notes, is popular beyond reason in England. This he theorizes is because of the chill and dampness of the island nation, which puts a premium on something warm, dry and comforting like toast. Pair it with a nice hot cup of tea and you have refuge from any storm the cold North Atlantic can throw at you.

Many people wonder that Arabs, living in the desert, are avid coffee drinkers. A hot beverage, there where it is already so hot? This becomes a complex sociological, religious, biological question. Of course they are Muslims, and cannot drink liquor, so coffee (and often, tea) fills the role of ice-breaker and social glue. Men sit around in restaurants and coffee houses arguing about the day’s news and drinking endless cups of dark, thick coffee. There are confusing and contradictory theories about what coffee does to one’s body in a hot environment: some say it only heats you up, but many people insist that by accelerating the body’s core temperature, perspiration–and thus cooling–is increased. A very likely answer to this conundrum may come in the observation that coffee, made from boiling water, was a long time  sanitary alternative to unclean drinking water.

This is surely why Chinese and other Asians drank tea to the exclusion of almost any other beverage for so long. When the Transcontinental Railroad was being built, Irish and other workers of European origin suffered regularly from dysentery and cholera, while their supervisors observed that their Chinese counterparts did not. Though they were years from the microbiological breakthroughs that would help them understand it, the answer lay in the fact that the Chinese workers drank only weak tea throughout the day.

Since the American Revolution, tea has never been as popular in America as in many other nations, except of course in the South, where it is drunk almost exclusively iced–and very, very sweet. Naturally it would be the South, where temperatures and humidity can be nearly unbearable for much of the year. The delicious and refreshing aspect of iced tea is finally being acknowledged in the ‘sweet tea’ trend which has recently swept American fast food chains (not to mention its profitability, since tea, as a wholesale commodity, costs only a fraction of what the major soft drink brands cost.)

But the most interesting thing in these foods or beverages we come to value because of our environment is that we still like them even when the specific environmental conditions do not prevail. I drink many tall, frosty glasses of ice water in January and February. The same for iced tea, which I drink all year round. I’m sure that it doesn’t have to be a December morning for a Brit to enjoy a nicely toasted crumpet and a cup of tea. Once a tradition is set, it is to our taste, and we miss it when we don’t get it.