An Interactive Shopping Spree

 

An Interactive Shopping Spree

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Growing up in tiny Harlem, Montana, local shopping, and there was no other kind, consisted of small individual stores for every need. A monthly trip to town and women could stock up on groceries and perhaps check out what’s new at the clothing store.

For breakdowns and tractor parts, back in the day, we had a plumber, an electrician, a couple hardware-variety stores, three farm equipment places, two car dealers and an insurance agent. For all things cowboy, we had a saddle shop. Hey, what more does one need?

Let me not forget catalogs. Do you remember catalogs? Such excitement and hours of enjoyment when fat wish books appeared in the mail boxes.

A few years later, a trip to Havre became normal, rather than a rare event. Imagine, whole blocks of stores of every variety. Eventually, on top of the hill, wonder of wonders, a mall. Under one climate-controlled roof, national brand names, everything one needed or desired.

Independent small stores struggled. Strip malls with boarded windows and closed doors began to resemble gap-toothed first-graders. Malls had it all and became social centers, places where friends gathered for a meal, for coffee, just to sit around a fountain and gab.

What brought on my reflections was a conversation with Denise who now lives in the Portland area. We were talking about the Lloyd Center, at one time one of the most exciting malls in the entire northwestern region. Even such a jewel as the Lloyd Center is looking bedraggled, like something chewed up and spit out.

Why go to the mall when one can sit in one’s recliner and with one click buy anything in the entire universe. Probably. If one has enough money.

I dislike online shopping. I do it. I recently bought a waffle iron online. I knew what I wanted. It was easy. And for something such as a waffle iron, actually makes sense, but that is because I know not one of the small tiendas in my town carries such an item. Books, yes, I buy books online.

Where I have to draw a firm line is shopping for clothing. Tempting as it is, I grit my teeth and click delete. I speak with the voice of grim and bitter experience. That beautiful blouse will not be the same color as pictured, will not fit the way it fits the model, and will probably not be cotton as described. Or linen. Or wool.

I’m sensitive to synthetic fibers. It’s hard to find cotton clothing. Even jeans have something mysterious added. If an item has a thread of cotton, the descriptive tag can read “cotton”. 

Think about it. I’ll bet in a short time I’ll be able to stand in front of my computer and ask it to dress me. “Show me what this blouse #A73b9plmK will look like on me.” And magically, the blouse will appear as if I am actually wearing the item. “Uh, okay, please show me the same item one size larger.” “Good. How about green instead of blue, please.”

I’m not sure how I’ll deal with the fiber content of the blue/green blouse but I’m sure some genius will find a way for me to virtually feel the fabric. 

Oops. I am so far behind times, a jet plane could not catch me up. Here I thought I was being so futuristic, so forward thinking, only to learn my futuristic fantasies are already here.

My daughter told me when she buys glasses, she sends her photo to the online site “store” and from that, she can “try on” glasses and choose the frames she likes best. She said they have apps for trying on clothes. They are here now.

I’ll wait. I want to be able to instruct the computer to give me my appropriate size but please shave off twenty pounds and thirty years so I can send pictures to friends of the wonderful blouse I just bought online!

I’ll wait until I have a completely interactive computer. When I ask my interactive buddy if this outfit makes me look fat, it will reply, “Never, my love.”

I will stand in front of the all-seeing computer eye each morning and chant, “Mirror, mirror, on my wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”

My sweet interactive computer will reply, “You, my Queen.”

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

November 11, 2021

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“Every day the clock resets.”

 

“Every day the clock resets.”

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Changes happen whether we want them or not, don’t they? It’s just the way it is.

This week we in Mexico fell back, time, the clock. Since I’m not tied to a schedule, my body works by the sun. Sunshine, wake up. Sundown, yawn. You’d think the clock change wouldn’t bother me a bit, but it always does, puts me on edge for a few days. I find myself thinking, whether spring or fall, the clock says ‘seven’, but, the “real” time is ‘eight’.  

I was blathering on to my son Ben about infrastructure and jobs and commerce, blathering without benefit of much that was factual, more from historical perspective. Or mis-perspective.

Ben quickly set me on a new path of thinking, with information about robots, artificial intelligence and computerization, things I’d rather not think about or know about, frankly. Curmudgeon that I am.

What that talk did was jog me out of my complacency, reminded me that things will change, no matter what I think and they will not return to what might have seemed like former glories, which on closer inspection, shine not so gloriously but look rather corroded.

I like to think I handle change with aplomb, but my first reaction to some of the coming changes Ben laid out before me was not based on thought but an emotion. Fear. Oh, dear. I like to tell you I handle change with excitement, with anticipation, with questions. That’s what I like. But I felt afraid.

Ben painted me a picture of life where technology freed us ordinary people from the slavery of mundane tasks, a world where everybody had food and a washing machine and water, a world where we were free to pursue our passions, our interests in things for which we never seem to be able to make time.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Sounds like a fairy tale to me. I recalled a video Ben showed me, at least ten years ago, of communication possibilities between a person and a computer. My eyes stretched wide with wonder. Today that imagination is everyday ho hum reality.

So I suppose that whatever our kids can imagine, perhaps it will become reality for our grandchildren. I like fairy tales. Grew up on them. I hope I can keep growing.

It’s time for me to step back, sit down, shut my mouth, listen and learn and watch as our younger generations remake the world. They will. They have technological skills and imaginations and creativity of which I cannot comprehend.

And the young people are taking away one of my favorite weapons—criticism. I cannot criticize that which I do not understand. 

The thing is, changes are happening so quickly we no longer have enough information to simply say, oh, this is good or, oy, that is bad. But change is here, not to stay, but to evolve, to change and change again.

Lucky us, to be on the outside looking in; I say that with my heart in my mouth. To mis-quote Dickens, we live in the best of times; we live in the worst of times.

Mistakes will be made along the way, of course. Like we never made any? That is where the fear comes in, isn’t it?

When it comes to change, I’m aware there is little I can change, perhaps nothing, other than my own attitudes.

The sun comes up. The sun goes down. I wonder if it laughs at us in between times.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

November 4, 2021

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Did you wake this morning still breathing?

 

Did you wake this morning still breathing?  

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Years ago when I was in the hospital in India getting a new knee, I walked the corridors as part of my therapy. At the end of the hallway I stood at the window and watched the construction activity across an empty lot. A new building was going up the old fashioned way, with men’s muscles, not machinery.

The empty lot was not really empty. The men’s families were camped in the lot. I’m making an assumption here. Perhaps they were homeless people, but as I watched, they seemed to be the families of the construction workers.

Pieces of cardboard, plastic, canvas, any flat surface, were cobbled together for shelters. In one corner a standpipe with a turn faucet provided the water supply. The women squatted over open fires, cooking. They washed their clothing in buckets. Children played around their mothers’ feet.

Every afternoon at 3:00 the skies above Bangalore opened. Monsoons are not comparable to the rainy season here in Jalisco. We have rain. They had deluge. The streets overran with water and garbage and unidentifiable debris.

When I was in China, I had the marvelous experience of riding a train inland. This was not an Amtrak train. In the center of the car was an iron stove, coal or wood, on which a hostess or porter heated huge iron kettles of water to make tea, available for a few pennies.

We passed huge factories flanked by housing for the factory workers. The train rain through tea plantations, fields of crops I could identify and others I could not, through cities and past city dumps crawling with children who lived at the dumps, pawing through the trash, picking out any item which could be sold or recycled.

I was reminded of living in Great Falls in the mid-sixties when one day I went with my husband to the dump out by Hill 57. We could have been in China. Today we do a much better job of hiding, of keeping invisible, our homeless and poor.

One of the big news items of the day is the universal scream, “What are we going to do about the upcoming Holidays with the empty shelves, the supply chain buckled?” What indeed?

One of my most memorable Christmases was also one of my poorest. In terms of grace and gratitude, one of my best. Newly divorced, I had moved from Chicago back to Montana and had little other than kids and a cat.

I’d recently started a new job for which I had no wardrobe. A woman showed up at my door with an armload of appropriate clothing. A neighbor family brought us a turkey.

On Christmas Eve we went to Church, returned home to find a tree on the front steps and another tree with a tree-stand on the back porch.  A knock on the door revealed another neighbor with an armload of well-loved decorations.

A friend from California had sent a box of gifts, a full set of clothing for each child, including shoes. When she was a child, her mother had been in a similar situation and somebody had done the same for her family. She asked that someday I do similar. I never forgot.

My own gifts for my children were sparse, much needed socks and coats plus one “toy”. Santa gave Ben, at two years old, a tool chest full of plastic tools. Dee, fourteen, got the boom box she wanted.

While I was fixing the meal, Ben crawled under the vintage table, formica top and steel legs. With his plastic screw driver he removed every screw from the legs. I noticed Ben was too quiet so asked his sister to check on him.

Dee Dee found Ben pulling the last screw from the fourth leg, crawled under the table with him and helped him replace the screws. Had the table top fallen, Ben would be no more. That set the pattern for his growing years. He needed to know how everything worked. Dee Dee is still saving lives.

In town there lives a family who touched my heart. In the first wave of the Covid 19, the whole family was ill and the father died. That left mom with two small children and elderly parents. This family is “needs food” poor. I know neighbors will show up with clothing and toys.

My Christmas gift will be the “turkey”, however that translates as the day arrives. This woman doesn’t know me. The family will never meet me. Now and then, when Leo goes shopping, I put extra pesos in his hand for “my family”. That is my gift to me.

I’ve been poor. I’ve seen poorer. Today I am rich. I have a refrigerator and electricity. I have a washing machine and running water. I have food in the pantry, enough to live a week without buying more.

When I wake up still breathing, I know how rich I am.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

October 28, 2021

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You can please some of the people . . .

 

You can please some of the people . . . 

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This morning a friend whom I’ve not yet met sent a photo of foliage turned colors in Maine. Everywhere the season is turning a corner. Maine. Montana. Mexico. Everywhere.

Rains are tucked back into their rain locker until next rainy season. We’ve a week with nary a drop of moisture, nary a cloud in the sky-blue sky. Immediately the daytime temperatures ramped up fifteen degrees.

I put away the rain towels, draped across my windowsills since June. Just like that, I’m out dragging hose, watering plants, potted and otherwise.

Familiar birds flew to greener—or possibly browner—pastures. New birds arrive. However, the AAA Bird Map has scrambled the flight plans. There are at least two stranger-type birds. One has a shrill call like an old-fashioned telephone ring tone. Makes me whip about my head to alert every time I hear it. The other has a sound that imitates the name of an expensive beverage, one with an umbrella on the rim.

The huge white bed-sheet butterflies are back. But what is that strange black one? This whole year has brought more butterflies than I’ve ever previously seen. See scrambled flight plans above.

And, ah, yes, the snowbirds return. My neighbors. Some of whom I’ve not seen in two years. Like animals to the Ark, two by two, they will arrive.

Ordinarily, this would be cause for rejoicing, excitement, anticipation of celebratory meals and adventurous treks to explore the countryside ‘round and about. Most years.

What is wrong with me? Have two years of reclusive living turned me upside downside?

At times like this, I sit myself down and have a heart-to-heart. Have I gotten this selfish? Have I, who have always been flexible, ready to change paths on a whim, cemented myself into my routine? I hear my friend Peggy from years past ask me, “What’s your motive?” Ah, yes, that.

It’s such a small thing. Petty, really. I’ve always been a people pleaser. If I do what I think you want, maybe you will like me. Some of my more recent friends would roll on the floor snorting to hear me say those words. But they are true.

Sure, a few years counseling and some heavy personal work pretty much eradicated the problem. But it never goes away. A shadow of my old people-pleaser will always live within me.

And my solution is so simple. Two by two, I tell my friends, “We will visit after you’ve done a trip quarantine.” I will follow up with “Masked, outside on a patio, no hugs.”

Nancie and Pat, my cousins, will arrive first. Nancie is our group social coordinator. She loves to gather all the neighbors for a pot-luck dinner. “Nancie, I think that is a great idea. You all have fun. I’m not ready to join large group activities.”

Then another couple will invite me out to dinner in one of the few restaurants still open. “That’s lovely. You all go and have a good meal. Maybe I can join you in a later month. I’m not ready yet.”

I intend to host small meals on my patio, one couple at a time. I’m not a total stick-in-the-muddle-puddle.

Most of all, I dread hearing. “But you are vaccinated. We are vaccinated. We all are safe. You’ll be okay.”

I’ve been practicing my lines: “You might be right.” “You are probably right.” “You are undoubtedly right.”

Finally common sense returned. “Sondra, you are not that important. Who cares what you decide? These are your friend and neighbors. They like you. They will respect your decisions.”

Maybe. Probably. Undoubtedly.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

October 21, 2021

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