Miracles in our lifetime

How did records happen? The leaps of faith and logic required seem miraculous. What made someone think they could reproduce sound by attaching a needle to a megaphone and applying it to a rotating bit of wax — and then the evolution that replaced the megaphone with an electronic device called a microphone and developed the means to amplify the needle’s vibrations to fill rooms and auditoriums?

I look at the squiggles etched into the vinyl surface and can scarcely imagine how they will be translated into glorious sound. And don’t get me started on how over the years they have miniaturized the process so the sound from hundreds of these 12-inch records can be condensed into a flash drive, also known as a thumb drive because it is about the size of a human’s thumb.

I am in awe of the technology that brought music into my living room 60 years ago. I am only beginning to wrap my head around the technology that has evolved in the ensuing six decades.

The camera I used to take the photo of a record being played can also shoot video, record sound, take dictation, connect me with countless sources of news, information and entertainment, read me a book, play me any recorded music I want to hear, and oh yes, I can make a phone call with it.

And it weighs about six ounces.

My father was born three years after the first commercial radio station went on the air. I often marveled at the scientific achievements he witnessed in his lifetime, and lately I’ve been pondering what I’ve been experiencing in my own lifetime. Outside of the realm of politics and government — where the goal seems to be to wreak as much death and destruction as humans can muster — a lot of people have been busy making this a much better world than our forebears could imagine.

Equinox blessings

The forecast is for spring. With last weekend’s snowfall measured in feet, the weather people are predicting high temps in the mid 30s to upper 40s for the foreseeable future. The storm of April 2018 haunts us with the guarantee that it still could snow, but not before this snowfall does quite a bit of melting over the next 10 days.

And so it seems a grand time to throw a spring equinox. We hereby declare that the sun must stay above the horizon longer each day than below for the next six months.

May chlorophyll-green invade and conquer the land. May the sun yield sunflowers and coneflowers and wildflowers beyond our ability to count. May birds nest and fledglings fly and children run and dirty their knees. May the land burst with bounty enough to keep our bellies full through the next season of winter, months from now.

Let bandshells in town parks everywhere sprout music of all shapes and sizes. The music of spring and summer is joy joy joy to the world — let heaven and nature sing!

I look across the yard and into the woods and see gray and white. The only color is from the lawn chairs, and even there you could not sit without brushing away a cushion of cold, wet white. But last Saturday, before the storm, a fresh green glow was starting to emerge from the ground, and no doubt it waits beneath the snow and will be even greener after it quenches its thirst on the spring melt.

“Yeah, right, it sure looks like the first day of spring,” leers the cynic. But he can’t deny the truth: It is, indeed, the first day of spring. We survived another winter, and the season of light is upon us.

Come from behind the screen

Once upon a time, a screen was a partition that blocked a corner of the room so someone could change their clothes with some measure of privacy. That’s right — the purpose of a screen was to block the view.

As time has proceeded, screen has become the name of the glowing portion of a device that carries images, sounds and words from throughout the world, first into our living rooms on television sets and eventually into our pockets.

I suggest that these electronic screens serve to block the view as efficiently as the old room partitions.

I first noticed this a few years ago, when important and even historic events were accompanied by dozens of people lifting their screens to capture the image instead of experiencing the moment in real life. The moments in all their brilliance — sights, smells and sounds all about us — were reduced to what could be absorbed by a tiny camera with a tiny microphone.

Oh, that means you could relive the moment over and over again, at least that fraction of the moment that the tiny device recorded, but the moment itself was lost in the effort to manipulate the device. The electronic toy screened us from the full reality of the moment.

So much of what we know anymore is filtered by our view from behind the screen.

It behooves us to come out and look reality in the eye from time to time — especially in these times when so many people hide behind a political screen, so much that is real is being missed.

Set down your screen, smile on your brother and get to know him as he really is, not as he appears through the screen.

A window screen is designed to let fresh air into the room. That feels like a healthier model.