Old School

A Phone Call to the Future

1.

Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past.
The console television with three channels.
Black and white picture. Manual controls:
the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven.
You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things.
You have to leave the house to mail a letter.

Waiting for letters. The phone rings: you're not there.
You'll never know. The phone rings, and you are,
there's only one, you have to stand or sit
plugged into it, a cord
confines you to the room where everyone
is also having dinner.
Hang up the phone. The family's having dinner.

Waiting for dinner. You bake things in the oven.
Or Mother does. That's how it always is.
She sets the temperature: it takes an hour.

The patience of the past.
The typewriter forgives its own mistakes.
You type on top sheet, carbon, onion skin.
The third is yours, a record of typeovers,
clotted and homemade-looking, like the seams
on dresses cut out on the dining table.
The sewing machine. The wanting to look nice.
Girls who made their dresses for the dance.

2.

This was the fifties: as far back as I go.
Some of it lasted decades.
That's why I remember it so clearly.

Also because, as I lie in a motel room
sometime in 2004, scrolling
through seventy-seven channels on my back
(there ought to be more — this is a cheap motel room),
I can revisit evidence, hear it ringing.
My life is movies, and tells itself in phones.

The rotary phone, so dangerously languid
and loud when the invalid must dial the police.
The killer coming up the stairs can hear it.
The detective ducks into a handy phone booth
to call his sidekick. Now at least there's touch tone.
But wait, the killer's waiting in the booth
to try to strangle him with the handy cord.
The cordless phone, first noted in the crook
of the neck of the secretary
as she pulls life-saving files.
Files come in drawers, not in the computer.
Then funny computers, big and slow as ovens.
Now the reporter's running with a cell phone
larger than his head,
if you count the antenna.

They're Martians, all of these people,
perhaps the strangest being the most recent.
I bought that phone. I thought it was so modern.
Phones shrinking year by year, as stealthily
as children growing.

3.

It's the end of the world.
Or people are managing, after the conflagration.
After the epidemic. The global thaw.
Everyone's stunned. Nobody combs his hair.
Or it's a century later, and although
New York is gone, and love, and everyone
is a robot or a clone, or some combination,

you have to admire the technology of the future.
When you want to call somebody, you just think it.
Your dreams are filmed. Without a camera.
You can scroll through the actual things that happened,
and nobody disagrees. No memory.
No point of view. None of it necessary.

Past the time when the standard thing to say
is that, no matter what, the human endures.
That whatever humans make of themselves
is therefore human.
Past the transitional time
when humanity as we know it was there to say that.
Past the time we meant well but were wrong.
It's less than that, not any more a concept.
Past the time when mourning was a concept.

Of course, such a projection,
however much I believe it, is sentimental —
belief being sentimental.
The thought of a woman born
in the fictional fifties.

That's what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing's stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity.
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.

All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.

--Mary Jo Salter

I love the point this poem makes that oftentimes the past seems more bizarre than the future. When we look back on those gigantic cell phones that people used or 8 tracks and any number of old school technology, how can we help but feel it was the past that is unbelievable?

This week, I had my own brush with old school technology . First, I received a couple of aerograms from my sponsored Kenyan child Lydia. Seeing the light blue envelopes with these elaborate stamps on them in my mailbox was such a lovely surprise. After all, who gets letters anymore much less aerograms from Africa? Slitting them open carefully and seeing the handwriting brought me back to when I was a kid and my parents would always get those aerograms with the red and blue borders around them from relatives in Asia.




I also broke out my dad's old school AE-1 Canon, thinking I might take it on a road trip I'm going on. He bought it in 1984 and it's in great shape. He still had the original box and manuals that it came with. Unfortunately, it wasn't as easy as it looked to use. First off, I had to find a new battery and that took some searching around. Then loading the film was a bit tricky and I was never quite sure that the film really was winding. Of course once I started snapping photos, there was no way to be sure that the photo was clear or that the light was right. There was no instant playback button. Finally, once I finished up the roll of film, finding a place to develop it also wasn't easy, not to mention that developing the roll of film was about $10-15 depending on if you wanted the images converted to a CD. And much like Salter's poem recalls the loudness of the rotary dial phone, each click of the shutter with this camera was far from subtle. The duck I took a picture of turned to look at me after I took it's picture as if to say, "Sheesh, that was loud!"

It would've all been worth it had I came up with some stellar shots but sadly, the photos didn't come out so great mostly due to my not-so-hot skills with this camera and my accidentally exposing the film (or perhaps it was because the film was quite old as well) when I was changing the lens.




Though I enjoyed the heft and feel of this vintage camera, and I definitely felt a connection to my dad and the past in using it, I decided I won't be using it on my road trip. Too many unknowns when I just want to take the shot. So I will be getting into my spaceship to catapult back into the present, leaving the world of science fiction behind again for now.