Category: Connection

Convenienced into Helplessness

On By ednafroeseIn Aging, assumptions, Connection, Convenience, efficiency, Kindness4 Comments
To be here, on this mountain slope in Yukon, was not easy. Most certainly, it was worth whatever effort was required.

 It is true that “convenience” is not a verb, not even an intransitive one. It might well be intransigent, though, in its subtle and unstoppable destruction of a society that once fostered kindness in our simple interactions with those who offered us a service.

            I begin with an anecdote from my earliest teaching days. As a new sessional lecturer in the English Department of the University of Saskatchewan back in the days before personal computers sprouted in every office, I was deeply grateful—almost every day—to the secretarial staff in the department office. I told them which textbooks I wanted to use, and they ordered them for me, made sure that I got a free desk copy for my own use, and submitted the list to the bookstore. How that all happened, I don’t know. I do know that we discussed my choices, and I was reassured that all would be well. And it was so. I was free to prepare the actual teaching.

 Near the end of the term, I submitted my typed copy of the final exam (some faculty turned in hand-written copies) to the secretaries for transformation into officially printed copies. Once I had finished marking the final exams, I filled in students’ final grades into the paper form supplied by the secretaries and then received by them. How those grade numbers arrived in the Administration Building was not my affair. I could pay attention to whatever student issues came up, such as deferred exams or questions about the next term.  

 Less than a decade later, during which I did the course work for my doctoral degree, I began teaching again, this time for a different college. I was informed, crisply, that I had to contact book publishers myself for any desk copies I needed, and I was responsible for sending my text list to the book store. After all, everyone now had her/his own computer and email address and could “conveniently” make whatever arrangements were necessary. Besides, the lone secretary in the office had many instructors to deal with and couldn’t be expected to provide that kind of service.

If I had thought that having to order my own books was a nuisance (yes, I know this smacks of privilege), that was because I hadn’t yet discovered that I was now also responsible for submitting grades directly to the Administration Office, using whatever software program had been designed for that exam period. My last phrase is deliberate: seemingly every time I had to submit grades, whether at Christmas or in late spring, the program had been changed and I had to learn a new interface. Hours and hours in the busiest season of academia were spent attempting to figure out what miniscule error I might have made that prompted the computer program to refuse my submission yet again. I thought about the hundreds of faculty on campus, each one sitting alone in front of a computer screen, swearing helplessly because the IT department had imagined that more “upgrades” were needed.

I will spare my readers the details of the day that my word processing program was updated, without prior notice, just as I was in the midst of writing a conference paper, with the deadline looming. For one entire awful afternoon, I couldn’t figure out how to access any of my files. I wished all kinds of horrible disasters upon the tech people responsible for my terror that I had lost all of the work of the previous weeks. Which one of them, I wondered, would submit willingly to have some stranger enter their home in their absence and rearrange, totally and irrevocably, their entire kitchen with all its contents—dishes, food stuffs, appliances? Would they not protest such a violation of their space in the name of “convenience”? Yet we poor, un-technically minded teachers and researchers had to submit not only to the monumental inconvenience of learning how to manage a new program but also to subtle implications that we were foolishly resisting progress or that we simply weren’t very clever.  

            I am grateful beyond measure to be retired now and freed from the tyranny of supposedly convenient technological enhancements to the act of teaching.

On the shores of a lake along the Alaska Highway, content with being there.

            Unfortunately I am still repeatedly learning helplessness because of the illusory goal of convenience. And here I move from the classroom to the city street. As a farm girl, I had learned how to parallel park using strategically placed straw bales (the small rectangular ones, not the humungous ones that now dot the prairie). What was much easier to learn was how to pay for downtown parking in the big city.  

Every car I ever drove, for decades, had a coin purse readily available. Putting coins in a meter was simple, even on cold winter days. Discovering that someone else had left time on the meter was delightful. If a meter was stuck and refused to accept more coins, that was not a problem for me. The meter reader would discover that malfunction before issuing a ticket.

Such simplicity is now gone. I still remember the day when I, now newly retired, planned to meet a friend on campus for coffee and discovered that new parking meters required me to use my phone to pay. There was no slot for coins. I did have a cell phone by that time, but it wasn’t yet a “smart phone.” And if I had had a smart phone, I doubt that I would have been equally smart in its use. I had no choice but to get back into my car, drive away to some neighbouring residential street that still had free parking and then walk back several blocks, now late for my meeting.

That helpless feeling has recurred repeatedly in the last years, as one form of “pay station” gives way to yet another version. In winter I loathe taking off my gloves to try to punch in my license plate number on an icy screen of some sort that half the time doesn’t work in the cold. That’s after I have walked a half a block in the opposite direction I wanted, just to find that pay station. Some of them still take coins, thank goodness, but I foresee a time when that option will also disappear. I will either cease going downtown altogether (go ahead, City Hall, whine about how people don’t come downtown enough) or simply refuse to pay for parking. At some point, I will doubtless get a ticket. Perhaps then I can actually find a person in City Hall and speak out against the relentless drive to keep changing technology in order to keep the tech dept. busy, and be damned to the vulnerable in the population.  

            I knew, at some intellectual level, that getting older would have disadvantages and that I would face an accumulation of losses. I had not reckoned with the soul-destroying helplessness that would accompany seemingly minor losses. Because the relentless drive for “convenience” (don’t ask for whose) inevitably eliminates personal interactions (think about the soullessness of online shopping or the maddening experiences of self-checkouts), the helplessness felt by the left-behind people is all the more acute. It’s one thing to have to ask someone for help. It’s another to find oneself alone with no one around to ask for help. No one, that is, except a disembodied voice from another country who finally speaks to me after I have listened through several menus and pushed numbers on my phone. And then I may not even be able to understand that disembodied voice.

 If I once imagined that the elder years would be spent thinking about huge questions about meaning and focusing on deepening relationships, I have been disabused. We are instead called upon, repeatedly, to learn new technology in order to accomplish once simple tasks. I don’t even want to contemplate what it will be like to try to negotiate complex health issues when every institution has been incorporated into some rats’ nest of online documentation. All that “convenience” of being able to book an appointment online (instead of speaking directly to a kindly receptionist) comes at a high cost.

I suppose that I can look forward to hiring a young person with some suitable training to be my personal guide through the coming, hyper-convenient world. Oh, wait, that won’t be a young person, will it? It will doubtless be a robot, of inscrutable age.

“Convenience and efficiency are not virtues: efficiency is a tool to make money, and convenience lures us into spending it, often foolishly and for no good purpose.”

Photo of a car and a small backpack tent next to a picnic table. It is a camping site in the forest next to a lake.
Neither the getting here nor the staying here was convenient, yet the beauty and stillness of the place lingers in my memory.

Hand-made and Heart-felt: my companion coffee mug

On By ednafroeseIn Connection, gifts, reflection, writingLeave a comment

            The gift was given so long ago that I cannot name the day or the occasion. I do remember the giver and something about the maker. I was in my early 20s. The giver was my brother, and the maker was a friend of his, an older woman. She was a kindly potter who understood many things—that I learned later through hearsay, for I remember meeting her only once, in her studio. Perhaps, though, I have only imagined that meeting.

photo of the mug, a small plate with a muffin, a magazine, a linen napkin, and reading glasses.

            The mug was not notable for its beauty, for it was squat and brownish. In those days, had it been left to my choice, I’d have picked something more elegant, like a Blue Mountain pottery piece, then much in vogue and now found only in thrift shops and on collectors’ shelves. What I did notice at once was how the mug felt in my hands. It belonged there – completely. Something about the shape suited my hands, fit the pattern of my holding. I soon discovered that its shape also kept the coffee hot longer, something that mattered to me then already. My coffee addiction developed early.

 In the first years we had together, my mug and I spent many hours in university classrooms. I remember plunking the empty mug in the bottom of my capacious book bag which I schlepped to campus day after day. The mug came with me because I had been inducted, in my second undergraduate year, into the pleasure of long seminar classes. My first one (on Shakespeare) always began with the professor’s ritual of plugging in an electric kettle to begin the process of making coffee, then asking a few “questions to boil water by.” (Yes, it was instant coffee, brand now forgotten – I was addicted to coffee but not yet choosy about what kind.)  Once the coffee had been made, we settled down to work on the serious questions for the day.

 No doubt, the mug was used often in later years, post-university, when babies came to complete our family and transform us from carefree twenty-somethings into responsible thirty-somethings, preoccupied with the weight of parenting and church involvement and bills and house-owning. I have no clear visual memories of the mug during those years, although I am certain that I would have used it regularly. It had been a comfortable (and comforting) companion from the beginning of its days with me. That would not have changed regardless of how busy and distracted I might have been.

 Then came the days of teaching, with an interlude of further graduate studies, and then teaching again – until eventual retirement. My first “offices” on campus were miniscule and temporary. Embedded in my memory are long days of solitude in a tiny carrel in the library, cherished because it had a door and a lock. That meant that I could leave books there, of course, but more importantly, my typewriter (remember those??) and my coffee mug. To this day, sentences flow more easily when my favourite mug sits at hand.

            After I gained a more permanent office in the gracious spaces of St. Thomas More College, where I taught for 19 years, my warm brown mug lived in my office.

photo of my office in STM College. The mug is visible on the desk, and in the background are many books on shelves and a computer monitor.

It came with me to the various classrooms I taught in. Often the coffee was barely lukewarm by the end of the class, and little of it had actually been consumed. What mattered was that I had it in my hand or nearby on the desk. I was convinced that I was then more relaxed and that my students participated more readily in the kinds of discussion on good literature that gave me the “teaching highs” I valued so much.  Perhaps even now, more than 12 years since my retirement, former students remember me with coffee mug in hand. I rather hope so.

These days, that mug, now over 50 years old, lives only in our home. I guard it carefully when we have houseguests, lest it find itself in strange hands. Silly, isn’t it? Surely a mug knows nothing of whose hands fit around its inviting shape. And a washed mug is always ready for the next use by whoever picks it up. But we have a relationship, I insist. It’s so close a tie that even my liking for a particular travel mug that I have now used for some 15 years doesn’t rival it.  

  Its particular virtues? I think the circumstances of its making, in a small pottery studio in a garage of a suburban home in Edmonton, are important. The potter was a gentle woman, an artist, aware of the aches of living, aware of the frequent unfairnesses that hide in the best of places. She did her work with love, that’s certain. Each mug, each piece of pottery was made for its unique self. In the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, my mug had its unique, living character, had its “inscape” from the beginning, and all the various stages of life that it has shared with me have only deepened that “inscape.”  

 Some day, one of our children will have to decide what becomes of that mug. Having survived so many years already, still uncracked and unchipped, despite an occasional fall to the floor, it is unlikely that it will ever be broken, certainly not by me.  

As I ponder its long life—and it is now so imbued with coffee flavors that it cannot be used for tea or hot chocolate or water—I recognize that it has given me one other pleasure: a lifelong appreciation for good pottery. When we travel, we are apt to find small galleries and craft markets (both indoors and outdoors) where we peruse the handmade items, and think about the love with which the items have been made. We have a small collection of handmade pottery mugs now, so that we can share our pleasure with family and guests.

            This Christmas I will once again dunk my homemade peppernuts into my coffee, served always in the perfect mug.  It was made in love, given in love, received gratefully with love.

Photo of the same kitchen table, with the mug now more prominent. Beside is a small bowl full of peppernut cookies,, a napkin, and teapot.
That is a teapot, yes, indeed. It happens to be more photogenic than any coffee pot that I own. Believe me, there is no tea in the beloved mug.

A Christmas Wish List for My Readers

On By ednafroeseIn Beauty, Christmas, Connection, Forgiveness, possibilityLeave a comment

Writing a blog, which I’ve done for almost four years now, is a lonely affair. I’m not complaining, since writing is almost always a lonely pursuit. Every now and then, though, I do think more particularly about my readers and try to imagine where you might live, or what we might talk about if we could have coffee together someplace interesting–in your country or mine.

Writing about Christmas is an additional challenge because of all the designated holidays that I am familiar with, this one has been written about and sung about and indulged in and celebrated more than any other. Surely everything that can be said about Christmas, concerning whichever grand narrative you choose to focus on, has been said – many times over. A wish list, on the other, can be new every year.

Unfortunately, these days the world seems locked into so many conflicts and stupid flirtations with apocalyptic scenarios that the very act of creating a wish list seems frivolous. One could, of course, go big and like one of my grandchildren, add to the list “the moon.” Why not? Why not ask for the utterly unlikely, such as world peace?

Instead, I will retreat as I often do to the small things, for they matter more than we think: it is out of little actions that our habits of mind are formed, and it is out of our habits of mind that we make the big decisions and the crucial speeches that can change the world. Well, our own small spheres at least.

So, the list:

At least once, in the days before and after Christmas, I wish for you the time to watch an entire sunrise, preferably in a place without street lights and power lines. In my part of the world, the days are very short now, and the sun rises after breakfast, as it were. Take a cup of coffee or cocoa with you and watch the subtle first hints of color transform themselves into a blaze of glory. It is always a miracle, especially when the nights have been long and dark.

I wish for you two uninterrupted hours or more in which to curl up in a comfy chair or wide window seat where you can let yourself become utterly absorbed in a good novel. Preferably a classic or a young adult book that will bring you into a world that has a stable moral centre and in which a happy ending can be anticipated.

I wish for you many warm hugs and I-love-you’s. There might be gifts involved as well, but they aren’t that necessary, are they?

I hope that in your home, your office, your favorite hang-out, there are flowering plants. In my world, that’s most likely to be poinsettias, but maybe you’ll be lucky enough to be near a spectacular amaryllis in full bloom. Or maybe where you live, there are gorgeous flowering shrubs outdoors. Let there be someplace where you can smell the earth and savor the complexity of petals with their heavenly tints.

And this last wish might seem perverse or more like an admonition than a wish: I hope that there is at least one opportunity for a phone call or an in-person meeting in which you can say, “I’m sorry,” and be heard and still feel safe. We are none of us faultless. Without a doubt, there are individuals who need to hear an apology that will open up possibilities for better understanding. Christmas inevitably contains some tough stuff; it’s the fall-out, I suspect, from over-wrought expectations of all sorts. I wish for you one interval of time, however brief, in which hope can arise and love increase.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

A Line Runs Through

On By ednafroeseIn Connection, family, LoveLeave a comment

The last academic conference that I attended—Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities 2011—was held at the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB. My husband had traveled with me this time, a few days before the conference began, so we could have a short holiday before I settled in to listen to many academics demonstrate their prowess with words and ideas.

            We visited the Hopewell Rocks, which we had been told many times we “absolutely had to see.” For land-locked prairie dwellers whose typical holiday was hiking in the Rockies, the mud flats of low tide, stretching endlessly toward the sky, were astonishing all on their own, never mind the mud-and-rock sculptures shaped by the tide, in its back-and-forthing for millenia. They were huge; they were grotesque and majestic all at the same time. Some were named: “Bear,” “Elephant,” “Dinosaur.” We were awed almost as much by the vast quantities of seaweed heaped up and sprawled everywhere. The mud itself had an enticing silky smoothness; I wanted to keep touching it.  

            Eventually, exhausted by sensory overload, we sat down on a clean rock to have some lunch. My gaze shifted down and inward. There is rest in mindful attention to detail. I had begun to appreciate still life photography, thanks to regular visits to Shawna Lemay’s blog Calm Things, which preceded her current blog Transactions with Beauty. I was learning to delight in small things, calm things, gentle juxtapositions, artful compositions. I was beginning to notice shades of color, textures, and lines, sometimes as subtle and beautiful and complex as anything I traced through novels and poems in my classrooms. So here, on a smooth rock in the midst of the ungainly, preposterous Hopewell Rocks, I assembled one small rock and half a kiwi, next to the line through which life was persistently growing.  

            My interest in Mennonite literature, which eventually became my PhD dissertation, began back in the early 1960s when I was in high school, when our small town’s comfortable insularity and piety was disturbed by the grandfather of Canadian Mennonite literature, Rudy Wiebe. His first novel (begun as an MA thesis) Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962) was the first novel in English by a Mennonite writer, and its realistic presentation of Mennonite life, with its hard work, godliness, pacifism, prejudice, and hypocrisy caused consternation among Mennonite congregations across Canada. That’s by way of backstory.

Wiebe subsequently became a major figure in Canadian literature; his best-known novels—Wiebe earned his first Governor General’s Award for fiction with The Temptations of Big Bear 1973—concern Indigenous peoples. He also wrote several novels with Mennonite characters at the centre, the last of which is Sweeter Than All the World (2001).

Photo of a book shelf, holding many of Rudy Wiebe's books. The prominent titles are Stolen Life, My Lovely Enemy, The Temptations of Big Bear, A Discovery of Strangers,, and Sweeter Than All the World.

            It was vintage Rudy Wiebe: a cast of unforgettable characters that spanned the entire history of Mennonites beginning in the 1500s; a central character struggling to make sense of his personal history and his inherited theology; a demanding, thick and powerful prose style that packed clauses within clauses in a breathless avalanche of thought and sensation, thus demanding close attention and several rereadings; and a network of metaphors that knit together not only various plot elements and characters in Sweeter Than All the World but also key themes explored in his previous Mennonite novels. I became aware of those latter connections only as I was working on a conference paper on STAW. As I unravelled and rewove those intertwined images, my heart strings were tugged so often that my writing repeatedly snagged to a halt in the midst of family memories of my own. Our worlds are not that far apart; his Mennonite novels lay bare my world, too.

Sweeter Than All the World may be difficult for non-Mennonites to get through. It takes a certain kind of awareness of both community solidarity and shared family histories of broken family connections to persevere through Wiebe’s seemingly fragmented story lines, so filled with suffering and loss. In the end, though, the fragmentation is undone, as much as it can ever be, by lines: threads of continuity, melodic lines of song, genealogical cords, pulleys and cables, all bound together by crucial sticking points (both those that hold—needles and poles—and those that hurt—knives), seemingly rooted in the earth. Call it grounded community, if you will, unsentimental, essential.

Fiction lets us enter other worlds, try on other identities, evaluate other values. It is thus that we learn compassion – through narrative imagination. Sometimes, too, fiction lets us see ourselves from another angle, from which we can test the strength of our personal connecting lines that let us grow.