In 1st grade, I flunked handwriting. Sister Immaculata, the sainted nun who had taught my father and generations of other 6-year-olds at St. Thomas Aquinas School, couldn’t teach me. My loops wouldn’t loop. My Palmer method was Palmer chaos. And I never got any better. It was the shame of my childhood and the bane of my maturity.
A friend once told me, “Thank you for your letter, but please, please, don’t ever write again by hand.” A high school teacher suggested I use a fountain pen, but that only made matters worse. The smooth-flowing, frictionless action of the fountain pen meant I could write faster–and sloppier–than ever.
I would look with green envy at the copybook perfection of someone else’s penmanship, so measured, so clear, so unlike the random spasms and herky-jerks that characterized my own. Such beauty, I knew, was beyond me, such elegance an impossible dream.
I was wrong.
My handwriting is, if possible, worse than ever. But today I’m able to compose letters and reports, signs and banners, even grocery lists of surpassing charm. My words are crystal clear; my sentences are as easy to read as if they were printed. In fact, that’s what they are: printed.
With the software on my home PC, it’s as if I have my own printing plant. When I sit down to write to Eunice and Ken in New York, I have a wonderful array of typefaces to choose from. Maybe I’ll use Peignot Medium this time. It’s a bit overfancy but playfully artsy. Or maybe Copperplate Gothic Light, a pleasantly archaic font that a mason might employ to carve words in stone. I can write like a medieval monk with the Calligrapher font or like Mr. Palmer Method himself with the Signature font. (If Sister Immaculata could only see me now!)
My compositions can be, literally, works of art. When I write a card to my dad, I can create one from scratch on the computer, choosing a set pattern or improvising a layout myself. I can use the program’s canned illustrations or import images from other software–a copy of a Rembrandt self-portrait in full color, say, to match my father’s dignity, or a Bastiani scene of the baby Jesus and the Magi from the 16th Century to wish him “Merry Christmas.”
It’s a small thing, of course, but a pleasure nonetheless, made even more pleasurable by its being unexpected. Before we bought our computer a year ago, I had no idea how, in just this extremely simple way, it would brighten my life.
In the office the other day, we were debating whether Americans are better off now than their parents were: Is modern life an improvement over the good old days? Are incomes higher or lower? Do we have more things? Less time? Better educations? Fewer job opportunities? More cars? More traffic? At some periods of U.S. history, these questions have been relatively easy to answer–times like the Depression, when the entire nation was on the ropes economically, or the Post-World War II 1950s, when everything was coming up roses. Usually, though, it’s a mixed bag, especially at historical moments like today’s, when the number of rich people is on the rise, the number of poor people is increasing even faster, and the middle-class is shrinking. Better in what ways? And for whom?
Still, even if it’s impossible to say, across the board, that life is better today, there’s no denying that myriad changes, large and small—-like the computer software that replaces my unfathomable penmanship with works of beauty–have enriched our lives immensely and in ways we never expected. Some of these changes are technological, some sociological. Through them, we’re living the Good Life–a better, easier, more fulfilling existence than in the good old days.
Of course, if you don’t have a job, or if you’re sick, or have just lost a loved one, or are overburdened by any of the multitude of problems that life throws at us, you’re not living the Good Life.
And it’s certainly true that there also have been myriad changes, technological and sociological, that have darkened our lives, complicated them, in some cases even shortened them. But they get more than their fair share of publicity. Let’s, for a moment at least, forget the gloom and doom and look at the wonders, the freedoms, the joys, the comforts and the vistas that, undreamed by our parents, are routine parts of our lives today.
Let’s consider, for a start, Fred Astaire.
When I was growing up in the Austin neighborhood on the Far West Side of Chicago, my father would crowd five or six of my brothers and sisters and me into his car on a Sunday afternoon and drive us to the Byrd Theater for a double feature. He didn’t pay much attention to the starting times of the shows. He would just drop us off, usually in the middle of a picture. We would see that rest of that film, all of the next one and then watch the first one again until we got to the part where we had come in. Then we would go out to the lobby and wait for Dad to pick us up. Once the films left the Byrd–they rarely stayed long–we would never see them again unless they popped up, usually years and years later, on “The Late Show.” I remember waiting and waiting for the television appearance of one obscure British comedy– “How to Murder a Rich Uncle”–in vain.
My tastes at the time ran to John Wayne and Jerry Lewis. Today, I’m more interested in the old musicals, particularly the films of Fred Astaire. When I feel the need of an Astaire fix, I just pop my tape of “The Gay Divorcee” or “Royal Wedding” into our VCR, and Fred is singing “Night and Day” or dancing on the ceiling of his hotel room. Or I run out to any of a number of video stores where I’m a member and get one of his other movies. If I feel nostalgic, I can rent the old John Wayne vehicle, “The Sons of Katie Elder,” or Lewis’s original “Nutty Professor.”
There’s a lot more to this than just convenience. VCRs have changed the nature of film as an art form. Movies used to be like plays, available for viewing only by members of a large audience at certain times in certain locations. Today, they’re like books, owned by virtually every household in the nation, accessible at a moment’s notice. You decide–not some theater owner or some studio head–if you’re going to watch “Citizen Kane” tonight, or “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” or “Do the Right Thing” or “Amazon Women on the Moon” or “My Left Foot.” Its an artistic revolution almost too sweeping to fully comprehend.
Another revolution: salads. My mother used to take a kind of backhanded pride in the mediocrity of her cooking. After all, just getting food on the table each night for her 14 children was something of a triumph. There would be meat (except on Fridays when, Catholics that we were, we would eat fish sticks or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese) and potatoes (often mashed rather lumpily by one of the kids), a vegetable and lots of milk. I don’t remember salads at all. Maybe everyone else in America was eating salads, but not us and not the rest of Austin.
So the fashionableness of salads–the awareness of their role in a well-rounded, nutritionally balanced diet, and the availability of a fairly wide variety of lettuce and other salad makings–is an improvement. Even more of an improvement is that wonderful invention, on sale at major supermarkets such as Dominick’s and Jewel: salad-in-a-bag, complete with dressing and croutons. All right, it may not be haute cuisine, but it goes from the refrigerator to the kitchen table in a matter of seconds–without the time and drudgery of cleaning and tearing the lettuce, chopping the carrots or shredding the cabbage. It’s a godsend for working parents.
Speaking of godsends, an oft-recalled story in our family involves the time that Teri, one of my many sisters, was a baby and went on a crying jag that no one could stop. Holding her on your shoulder didn’t work. Rocking her didn’t help. She didn’t want a bottle. She just cried and cried and cried and cried. Finally, my dad decided to change her diaper, only to discover that, the last time he’d done it, he had accidentally pinned one of those cute little chick-head diaper pins through the skin of Teri’s hip. No wonder she wasn’t happy.
I never pinned a diaper pin through the skin of either of my two children, but it’s not because I’m more dextrous than my father. It’s simply that today’s diapers are not only disposable, but they’re pinless as well. They almost make diaper-changing a breeze—-well, that may be overstating things. But there’s something almost transcendent about not having to wash out, bleach and launder those old, thick, cotton diapers and about being able to put a new diaper on your baby with just a few flicks of your wrist–and without the risk of stabbing your child or yourself in the process. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, if he had been a parent, would have agreed that disposable diapers are certain proof that there is a God.
There are other inventions that have changed the way I act and think. ATMs, for example. Remember how it used to be necessary each day to carefully calculate how much money you had in hand, how much money you needed and what stores would accept your check if you ran out of cash? Today, you can get cash, no questions asked, almost anywhere–gas stations, restaurants, malls, grocery stores, drug stores and seemingly any bank–often even in another city. A true measure of our family’s reliance on ATMs came during one summer vacation when Cathy, my wife, was outraged that the machines in a rural town in Wisconsin, connected to some small-potatoes bank network, wouldn’t accept her card. She was outraged, and we were hungry, because we couldn’t eat lunch until we got back to Illinois.
Like the ATM, voice mail has given me greater freedom. No longer is it necessary to sit by the phone–think of all those old love songs–waiting for someone’s call. And, often, it’s no longer necessary even to talk to the other person. Everyone has had the experience of engaging in an entire conversation through voice mail–and without the clutter of small talk. Of course, this leads to those awkward calls that begin: “Oh, you’re home. I was just going to leave a message.”
Life isn’t better today, however, just because of inventions. In some ways–not all, of course–we’re a more open society than we have ever been. Take my neighborhood, for example.
Growing up in Austin, the only kids I knew were Irish Catholics–the Foys, the Houlihans, the Prendergasts, the Nolans, the Caseys, the Bradys. One rare exception at St. Thomas was Luigi Franchi, one of my best friends, even though (or maybe because) he was Italian. The neighborhood was clannish, insular, afraid of anything–or anyone–out of the ordinary. And it was that fear that fueled the wildfire white flight from the community when blacks started buying homes and renting apartments there in 1967. In the space of a few months, entire blocks would shift from all-white to all-black. It was a time of great bitterness and pain–for those moving in and for those moving out.
Today, my family and I live in Edgewater on the city’s Far North Side on a block with Filipinos, Africans (I mean, people who have emigrated from Africa), East Indians, Serbians and Chinese as well as run-of-the-mill black, white and brown native-born Americans. Such diversity has its frictions, of course, and its confusions. Sometimes we adults have a hard time communicating, because our accents and our cultures are so foreign to each other. But that’s no problem with the kids, and it’s through the kids that we see glimpses of the richness of other worlds.
For example, David, my 11-old-son, is a close friend of a Filipino boy named Pierre. And it was because of that friendship that our family was invited to attend the cotillion for Pierre’s sister Kate–an elaborate and formal coming-out party that’s a tradition among the more well-to-do families in the Philippines. Everything was done just so, especially the choreographed dancing of Kate and her court. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment when, at the start of the dancing, Louie–Kate and Pierre’s father and a manager at a Coca-Cola plant–suddenly lifted Kate up high above him as if he were Mikhail Baryshnikov and she a prima ballerina. True, Louie had been carefully coached ahead of time on how to do this without breaking his back or dropping Kate. But it was breathtaking nonetheless.
And do you remember the hubbub a year or so ago about Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, the NBA player who, for a game or two last year, wouldn’t stand at attention during the playing of the national anthem because it seemed to him a violation of his Muslim faith? David and his friends, like young basketball players all around the country, were very interested in the controversy, even if they didn’t quite understand what it was all about. So, as young boys will do, they made fun of Abdul-Rauf with a lot of silly, puerile put-downs. That is, until Branden, one of their classmates at the local Catholic school and probably the best player on their 5thgrade team, told them to stop. In ridiculing Abdul-Rauf, he said, they were making fun of Muslims–and Branden himself was a Muslim. They stopped. It was a good lesson, a GREAT lesson, and one that in Austin we never had a chance to learn.
Then there’s my 8-year-old daughter, Sarah. A few days ago, she asked Cathy, “Mom, should I be a teacher or a principal when I grow up?” We were happy but not surprised that she thought being the boss was a valid option. I don’t think any of my 10 sisters back in Austin aspired to become a boss when they were growing up. None of them went beyond high school, except, in a couple cases, to take a course or two at the nearby community college. Their goals were to get decent jobs until they could find a man, marry and start raising a family. Not bad objectives, but Sarah sees a wider range of opportunities–although not unlimited. It galls her and galls us–“It’s not fair,” Sarah says–that there’s never been a woman U.S. president or a woman player in the NBA, or that women can’t be Catholic priests. It’s not that Sarah especially wants to be a priest or president or a Chicago Bull. It’s just that she doesn’t like being fenced out. Hers is a more frustrating life than the one she would have led in Austin 40 years ago, but a richer one, too. You go, girl.
There are other things about modern life that are better than the good old days: Air travel is less expensive, especially with the no-frills airlines. Telephoning long-distance, too, is cheaper, and easier. (Remember when getting a long-distance call meant something bad had happened–or that the kid away at college was in desperate need of money?) We’re more aware of our health today and of keeping in shape. I still play basketball occasionally, something my father never did in his late ’40s. (Of course, Robert Parish, a back-up center on the Bulls, is only four years younger than I am.) And, in the summer, air conditioning is ubiquitous. OK, maybe a lot of times it doesn’t work as well as it should on the CTA. Still, a sweltering Chicago summer is a lot less oppressive today when virtually all public buildings and most private homes are air-conditioned than it was in my parents’ era.
The present age isn’t perfect. You could nit-pick from now till doomsday. Yet for all the negatives, we are, in many ways, living the Good Life. Maybe it’s not the Promised Land, but back in the good old days our parents would have envied much of what we have and who we are.
And if that weren’t enough, I for one can’t find it in myself to complain about a world in which the Chicago River is almost clean, raspberries are on sale in the middle of winter, cars are equipped with rear-window defoggers, and I can get away, most days, with wearing jeans to work.
GOLDEN AGES ARE IMAGINED, RECALLED AND ANTICIPATED BECAUSE THEY COMFORT US. BUT WITHOUT ADVERSITY COULD WE THRIVE?
If ever there was a Golden Age, it was ancient Greece of the fourth and fifth centuries B.C., right? Athens had a full-fledged democracy at a time when most of the rest of the world was under the thumb of tribal chieftains and deified pharoahs. In philosophy, it was Socrates to Plato to Aristotle–the greatest keystone combination of the mind in all history. (Aristotle then tutored Alexander the Great who went out and conquered the world.) The Olympic Games were instituted–all those bare young men flexing their muscles for the joy and honor of it (and without the smallest taint of craven commercialism). And, in the arts, what a flowering: Think of the Parthenon, and Venus de Milo, and the birth of drama.
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But how golden was an age in which a large portion of the population–at least 40 percent and maybe as much as 80 percent; estimates vary–were slaves? And one that would force Socrates, one of humanity’s most original thinkers, to drink hemlock?
And one that produced, as a high point of its literature, a story about a man who kills his father, sleeps with his mother and then, discovering the truth, digs his eyes out of their sockets with a piece of jewelry?
They didn’t call them tragedies for nothing.
“Every age thinks some earlier age was the Golden Age–a Garden of Eden, a perfection from which we’ve fallen,” says Martin E. Marty, a Lutheran minister and professor of religious history at the University of Chicago Divinity School. “But you’re talking to someone who doesn’t believe there were Golden Ages.”
It’s the longing for an earlier age of innocence and light, of peace and satisfaction, that’s at the heart of the fashionable angst over whether present-day Americans are better off–happier–than their parents were a generation ago. Polls are conducted. Hands are wrung. Census data is sifted, and manipulated, and studied with the same edgy anticipation that shamans used to bring to the entrails of a two-headed ram. And with probably as much profit.
“Human nature doesn’t change,” says Dr. Carl Bell, a South Side psychiatrist and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “People are always going to complain. Things are never going to be perfect. People are going to wish for the past because, since it’s not here, it must have been better. Or they’re going to wish for the future because, since it’s not here, it has to be better.”
There’s no denying that life is different today.
Mary Pipher, a psychotherapist in Lincoln, Neb., and author of “Reviving Ophelia” (Putnam, 1994), says her clients are more stressed, more isolated, more overwhelmed by the demands of everyday existence today than when she started in practice 20 years ago. “They’re more likely to come in with just sort of a diffuse feeling that nothing is working,” she says.
Pipher herself looks back with envy to Boston and Cambridge of the early 1800s when the Transcendentalists–Emerson, Thoreau and their circle–formed a community of intellectual energy and emotional well-being. That, she thinks, would have been the one time and place in history when she would have been happiest. Of course, she acknowledges, that era wouldn’t have been quite so attractive or intellectually stimulating if she had been an Irish immigrant just trying to survive in the Boston slums.
And, truth be told, modern life, for all its tensions, does have its up sides. “Most of us, when we have a child with pneumonia,” Pipher says, “are glad we live in a time of antibiotics.”
Over the last quarter of a century, poll after poll has found that Americans believe their own lives and their own communities are in fairly good shape, but see the rest of the nation as more troubled. “It’s hard to make a case that we’re truly worse off,” says Larry Hugick, a polling expert, “but there’s a sense of national decline that’s been around at least since the ’60s.”
In other words, things may not be worse–they almost certainly aren’t all that worse–but they seem worse.
For that, David Axelrod, a Chicago-based political strategist who has advised President Bill Clinton and a galaxy of other Democratic candidates, puts the lion’s share of blame on television and TV news. “Crime,” he notes, “is a huge issue–even in places where crime objectively isn’t very high–because people watch the 10 o’clock news and the first 10 minutes is all crime. So they feel it’s a pervasive issue.”
It’s not that bad news is a modern invention. It’s just that, in the past, there was always an emotional distance between the audience (newspaper readers and radio listeners) and the events being reported. But starting with the Vietnam War, television began bringing the world’s tragedies and traumas directly to viewers with an immediacy that broke down the old walls. It was as if you were experiencing these events yourself–and, in a disturbing way, you were. “It’s in your face,” says Axelrod. And, even though bad news is experienced more deeply, there is still little a viewer can do to change it. The result is a visceral frustration.
Another source of profound uneasiness–this is really an irony–is the lack of a common challenge that would help unify the nation.
“We don’t have a Depression. We don’t have a war. We don’t have a cold war,” says Axelrod. “Those were rallying points when people pulled together and focused themselves.” They were also, of course, national emergencies of one sort or another. How many kids today worry about The Bomb? How many even know what The Bomb is?
“As individuals, of course, we never are satisfied,” says Martin Marty. “We’re hemmed in by the fact that we will die, the fact that accidents happen, the fact that everything passes and nothing’s lasting.”
William H. McNeill, author of such classics of world history as “The Rise of the West” and “Plagues and Peoples,” laughs when asked if any age in history was happier than another. “There’s no way you could plausibly measure such a thing,” he says, and then notes that most major books of past eras “are about how everything’s going to hell in a handbasket.”
Even back in prehistory, back before the complications of cities and markets, of trading and profit, people were people.
“There was a time,” McNeill says, “when the villages lived on their own products. In a good year, you would use the surplus in festivals–and dance the night away. And you could think of that as a Golden Age.”
But there were always lean months, and crop failure was a constant threat. “And you were never sure when armed men were going to come over the hill and take it all away.”
The fact is: Life is always a mix of the good and the bad. “You need some gloom and doom to motivate you,” says Carl Bell. “And you need hope, so you don’t give up.”
It is a final irony that, in this present era of whining and discontent, some of the most hopeful writings are by black women–that, out of the experiences of racial and sexual discrimination, have come such powerful words of affirmation.
Consider “SPEECH TO THE YOUNG: SPEECH TO THE PROGRESS-TOWARD.” It’s a poem by Chicago’s Gwendolyn Brooks that was carried on the sides of public transit buses in New York City:
Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
“even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.”
You will be right.
For that is the hard home run.
Live not for battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.
Okay, so maybe there never has been or never will be a Golden Age. But, as Brooks writes, “it cannot always be night.” Optimisim or pessimism, in many ways, is a choice–count your blessings or list your lacks.
But remember this: The Greeks also invented comedy.
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