All Stimulus, All the Time

Mobile phones, especially smart phones, are, among the great technological breakthroughs, rivaling the invention of the telegraph and the original phone.

 But they are not all blessing. I am persuaded that they are rewiring our brains, making us more connected but less social, shortening our already shortened attention spans, enfeebling our imaginations, and eroding our social graces. These same devices that have so much utility can be as addictive as alcohol, tobacco or drugs. We just can’t seem to keep our hands off of them.

THIS IS NOT A SUDDEN revelation, but a realization that has grown through observation and experience.

We no longer can bear to be alone, even briefly. Isolation is not something to be relished but rather something to avoid.

Plain old cell phones made it possible to reach out and touch someone far more readily than AT&T could have imagined when it adopted that slogan in 1979. It is if there was some pent up demand to talk, and now that we could banish aloneness except in those uncivilized regions where cell phone towers do not rise above the landscape.

Nowadays, if I walk down the aisle of the grocery store and hear people talking to themselves, or meet someone walking alone down the sidewalk talking and gesturing, I no longer assume they’re lunatics. If the car in front of me sits long after the light has changed, I assume the driver’s mind is on his telephone conversation.

Sometimes, when I am standing on a street corner waiting to cross, I count the number of drivers talking on their phones as they pass. It is nearly always a majority. I have never been much of one to spend time on the telephone, and I wonder what all those people are talking about.

But there is something worse than being alone. It is being bored, even for a microsecond.

Smart phones came along, and to borrow a Steve Jobs word, they are insanely useful — and addictive. Everyone could amuse themselves around the clock.

I AM NOT SOME LUDDITE wanting to smash the new looms. I have a smart phone, and with it I can check my and my wife’s calendars when I’m making an appointment, keep a shopping list, find the time and direction of the sunrise on Aug. 16, take a photo of my granddaughter, and look up the rules for a game. I can check my e-mail and the latest sports scores. There’s no end of apps that can do marvelous things. One person reviewed a 1991 Radio Shack ad and found that he would have had to spend $3,054.82 for the gadgets that are incorporated into his smart phone.

 Now to the downside: they suck us in and make us mindless. Many of us have laughed at the video of a woman walking right into a shopping center’s fountain while she was busily texting. We’ve seen people at restaurant tables playing with their telephones instead of paying attention to the person across the table from them. We’ve been put off by the bright light of a telephone screen in a darkened theater.

And most of us, I suspect, have felt the frustration of trying to have a conversation with someone while they were paying more attention to their phone than they were to us.

One person I know sits down to play one little game on her telephone and loses all sense of time.

It has been my experience that boredom often leads to creativity. When your mind is not occupied with some stimulus, it is free to wander in new directions and make new connections between old realities. I doubt that any significant idea has come to anyone’s mind in the middle of playing a game on their smart phone. I wonder if those who have become as habituated to constant stimulus as a crackhead has to his crystal will know what to do with themselves if the stimulus goes away.

I HAVE SKIRTED close to that addiction myself. I am trying to refrain from checking for e-mail more than a couple of times a day, and I am telling myself that I do not have to check the news headlines a dozen times a day. I’m even deliberately leaving my phone in the car at times.

As any recovering addict will tell you, it’s not easy.

But I am holding up as a goal an observation from Cicero: I do not consider any man to be truly free who does not sometimes do nothing.

Don't Make Eye Contact

FROM MY CHAIRr at the dining table, I watched a cat trot up the street in that sort of stiff-legged gait they employ when they are in only a minor hurry. The cat was on the opposite side of the street from the house, and in the gathering darkness I could not see much of its features. When it was even with our driveway, the cat turned left across the vacant lot and disappeared into the darkness. I could see that it was small and dark, perhaps all black.

There was no way of knowing, of course, whether the cat was someone’s pet. Cats are not respecters of property lines.

I was just as glad that I was inside and not in a position to invite  it to come sit for a spell and get acquainted. I — we actually — have a long history with cats. And we are determined at this time not to have another one — or any other pets. I claim that Adelaide has forbidden me to make eye contact with any stray animals.

I had dogs when I was a kid, (cats, too) but the dogs were always mutts, and they stayed outdoors. Not long after we were out of school and married, we adopted our first kitten — two kittens actually — and kept cats almost ever since. They were good pets for people who worked long and often odd hours.

From my observation of dog owners, if you get home late, the pet is likely to be waiting with a leash and saying, “Where on earth have you been? I’ve had my legs crossed for hours. We need to take a walk.”

A cat is more likely to affect disinterest, as if to say, “Oh, you’ve been gone? I hadn’t noticed.”

Cats seem to be determined to entertain or please you only on their own terms. If you cannot accommodate to a creature that shamelessly uses you, you’re not cut out for providing a home for a cat. I did not say own, because nobody truly owns a cat.

IN EXCHANGE for tolerating eccentricity and independence, we got years of entertainment, and, yes, companionship.

One of our first cats regularly greeted us from the roof of our small cottage when we arrived home from work. She would mew plaintively until one of us fetched her down. Poor thing can get up there but can’t get down, we thought. We thought that until Adelaide got home one day just in time to see the cat scampering nimbly down the tree that grew next to the house. Got tired of waiting for us to come home, we guessed.

Another cat — Ivory, the one which helped us civilize our two sons — decided that I was the devil incarnate. When I came into a room, she would slink out as if she feared for her life.

Our younger son opined that Ivory had just made up a game to amuse herself, an opinion bolstered by the fact that when I was the only one in the house, Ivory had no qualms about jumping in my lap and purring while I read a book.

After Lightnin’, our last picked cat, disappeared I vowed I wanted no other. Lightin’, my favorite of all the cats we have lived with, was part Manx and all smart. He also, I am chagrined to admit, behaved much like a dog without any of demands a dog makes on your time.

He was the only cat that actually came when I called. He sat by my chair while I read and jumped up in my lap on invitation. He asked to go out each evening (he neither wanted nor needed a chaperone), and in 30 minutes or so he would jump on the kitchen window sill and wait for me to open the door.

ONE NIGHT, after the rain had stopped, he went out. He never came back to his spot on the window sill.

I searched that night and the next day. No sign of him. We speculated that he’d been caught by the very large dogs down the street. They seemed to escape from their fenced yard with some frequency.

By then we were spending part of our time in Montgomery and part of it at Lake Martin. No more cats, we said.

There are two kinds of cats, however, ones you pick and ones that pick you.

Hendry (that’s not a typo) and Yellow Cat picked us, so theoretically at least, they were not our cats. Hendry belonged to our son and his family when they lived next door to us. When they moved to a new neighborhood, they took Hendry with them, but Hendry kept coming back to his old haunts. We reluctantly accepted responsibility for him.

When we moved full-time to Lake Martin, Hendry came, too.

Later came Yellow Cat. He apparently had been a pet at one time but had lived on his own for quite some time. He hung around our place — in sight but out of reach — until I began feeding him. We had a more formal sort of relationship: I fed him and took him to the vet when necessary; he did what he darn well pleased.

(The stories of both cats are detailed in Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines). Yellow Cat died of what the folks at the Vet School at Auburn said was a heart attack. Hendry went out one night and never came back, probably the prey of some wild critter.

Though neither was technically our cat, we were attached to both and we saddened by their loss.

Thus the dictum about not making eye contact with stray animals.

As I watched the little cat disappear into the darkness, I acknowledged it wasn’t just Adelaide’s dictum. It is mine, too.

Getting to Where We Are

ADELAIDE AND I have never been ones to chase trends. I think we've become part of a trend, anyway. We are among those who have figured out they would be happier with fewer things and less space. We may not be in the vanguard of that movement nationally, but we are at least riding the early waves that are landing at National Village, a housing development at Grand National in Opelika, one of the courses on Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail developed by the Retirement Systems of Alabama.

Our cottage is on the second street of cottages to be built in National Village. Some houses on the street were  already occupied when we chose our lot last spring, but there were more vacant lots. Since we joined the neighborhood at the end of August, several more houses have been completed. A house is nearing completion on the lot next door to us, and I'm told that the lot on the other side of us has been sold. A friend—actually the person responsible for us being here—has reserved the lot across the street from us.

We lived in our house on Lake Martin longer than in any house since we have been married, and we loved living there. The lot was steep, and the house was tall. It was on a point, and in the mornings I sat in the little reading room off our second-floor bedroom, drinking my coffee and watching the sun's first light catch the ridge across the slough. In the evenings, we often sat on the front deck, drinking in the solitude. Visitors, especially children, were intrigued by the widow's walk, where you could lie on your back on a clear night and stare straight up into the Milky Way.

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, we talked about downsizing in an abstract sort of way. We were happy enough where we were. We had good neighbors and a good community, and no place was calling us. We also had a tall house on a steep lot, a house that was built with children and grandchildren in mind. When the children and grandchildren (and their friends and their children) could not come as often as they once had, we realized that we were heating and cooling and cleaning and maintaining a lot more space than we truly needed.

Finally, with our impeccable sense of timing, we put the house on the market just about the time the housing market fell right off the dock. Homes on the lake fell into the category of luxuries, and no one was chomping at the bit to buy ours. After a year without any serious action, we let the listing lapse. We appreciated our good fortune at living in a place where many count themselves lucky to spend a few precious weeks of vacation, and we faced no deadlines for taking the next step in our lives.

At the end of last winter, we decided to try again. We did not have a plan for what we would do if someone actually bought the house and didn't feel pressed to make a plan, a lack of optimism, I suppose.

Then somebody bought the house. It all happened more quickly than we had anticipated.

ONCE WE REALIZED that we weren't likely to find something that met all of our requirements on the water, the Auburn/Opelika area entered the picture. We shopped and ate and went to entertainment and cultural events here, but we had never thought seriously about calling it home.

We had visited several times with an eye on it as a place to live. But that was considering it as a place to live for a friend, also a lake dweller, who was looking to downsize.

Of the places we looked at with our friend, the only one that had any appeal for us was National Village. 

So facing the reality of moving, we paid several more visits, this time viewing it as a possible home for us

There would be tradeoffs, of course. Less space, but less time and money allocated just to housing; less privacy, but more convenience. The fact that Retirement Systems of Alabama was the developer added to the appeal. I have observed RSA for many years, and it does not do shabby.

So we picked a plan and signed a contract. And  after disposing of an awful lot of possessions—it is not in Proverbs, but it is a truism that as long as you have a place to put stuff, you tend to keep it—we moved into an apartment in Auburn.

THERE WERE SOME bumps in the construction process, of course; no building project is without vexations. None of those vexations were major, though, and the builder, Conner Bros., has been responsive when we've found a problem.

We moved in at the end of August, and are mostly, but not totally settled (more about that latter).

We like that fact that everyone we've met is pleased to be here. We like the fact that it is not a gated community. We like the fact that the community isn't made up exclusively of retirees. We like the fact that there are community activities to engage in but that there's no pressure to do so. We like the fact that although lot sizes are small, the housing areas occupy only a small part of a larger, undeveloped space.

It is, we think, the right place for us.

 SOME LESSONS from our experience:

Give away or burn your possessions. No matter how much stuff you get rid of, you will move too much. Furniture from a larger house may be out of scale for a cottage. Think about some of the things you have held onto, not because you like them  but because you inherited them from someone. Liberate yourself and spare your children a burden.

If you are building a new home, keep careful notes of your meetings with the builder, and write down all of the things you have selected, from paint colors to trim, to fixtures. I don't suggest this because I think builders are crooked or incompetent. It is just that so many people are involved in building a house that missteps are too easy. And it is easy for you to forget some of the choices you did make.

Consider getting professional help. We hired a decorator to help us with colors, materials selections, design modifications and furnishings. We are happy with the result.