Time and Place

This afternoon a friend came to visit, making her way here from directions I had supplied her in an email.  Stopping at a deli to buy sandwiches for us all threw her enough off course that she called from her cell to get redirected.  Somehow I could not lift the fog of her confusion so I talked her through the directions that got her around two mistakes and to our very driveway.  We both congratulated ourselves for living in the modern world where there were cell phones.  It made me think of Odysseus as a lad when Homer describes him going over to the Peloponnesos from the island of Ithaka to visit his grandfather Autolykos where his return was a long time delayed as he lay abed recovering from being gored deeply in the leg by a wild boar.  Homer does not suggest that his father and mother grew deeply anxious at this delay; they simply waited out the days until he returned.  That was because there were no means of communication, so they had no choice.  In the 19th century my grandfather Wilhelm came to the States as a teenager and at nineteen enlisted in the Union Army. Twenty five years later he returned to Halle an der Weser, long since married, and a father of eight himself, to visit the family he had left behind all those years ago.  In the interval he had pretty much spoken English exclusively to the degree that the journal he kept of his return to the homeland is all in English. It is poignant when he remarks in this English on the day of his departure from the family home that he will probably never see his parents or his two brothers again, and he was right. Contrast that with today's immigrant into the States who can keep up with his family easily by Skype.  There is no reason for the next generation not to stay fluent in their grandparents' language. When I was eighteen I chose to go to work in New York and forego college.  My mother and I exchanged letters which contained news of our doings couched in the language and sentiments we felt to be suitable, the product of considerable thought and rewritings.  A telephone call would have been considered unseemly, a costly extravagance of money and emotion.  My friends today have daily texts, nay some have hourly ones, with their children off at college.  It would have been a ghastly intrusion if I had had to endure a cellphone call whilst I was writhing and panting in some or another forbidden and delicious passion.  When we lived in Brookline Massachusetts our children walked into the family home after school threw down their books, and disappeared with the neighborhood gang of 17 children ages ten to eighteen until it was dark and they reappeared to interrupt us at our cocktails.  We had  not really noticed their absence.  They went on extraordinary expeditions, those kids; once we learned they had gone on the city transit line to the furthest reaches of the system, a rough and tumble section, alighted, ducked under the turnstiles and come home.  One of my sons complains that his childrens' school sends daily emails to the parents detailing their childrens' every move.  After school athletics programs have every kid slotted into activities throughout the afternoon.  There is no place to escape to anymore.