Purple, with a Red Hat

Many years ago, when I worked on the Drama Desk of the New York Daily News, I attended a Broadway play titled “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.” As a young man beginning his career, I didn’t understand what that title meant. Now I do.

It’s a bot call Klara at my eye doctor’s practice that has me ready to jump ship.

It “answered” the phone last week when I called to schedule an appointment. My first instinct when it asked how it could help me was to ask to speak to a human. But I knew that would only serve to solidify my developing identity as a crotchety old man.

So I dealt with it until I got what I wanted, then hung up on him in mid-sentence.

One isn’t compelled to be polite to a robot.

Psychologists tell us our small daily interactions with, say, clerks, salespeople, and Uber drivers are healthy for our mental well-being. Now we are being stripped of even this inconsequential but healthful nicety.

We are being unclothed every day from our dignity as a caring people. A war we didn’t ask for. Wholesale disruption of people’s lives from mass firings by political hacks. The elimination of a Medicare/Medicaid subsidy that next year will result in steeper out-of-pocket cost increases for seniors like me. This announced last week by a government appointee who has some eighteen real estate assets, with ten residential structures on them. 

“The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” an itinerant preacher named Jesus once said. 

I don’t know what to do about it. Even my vote in November isn’t going to stop the creeping dissolution of our social fabric.

Thomas Keating, the Trappist monastic abbot who developed the practice of Centering Prayer, advises us to stop resisting life’s foibles. If you’re sick and one physician after another can’t figure out what’s wrong with you, just accept the fact that you’re sick, he says.

His suggestion strikes me as defeatist. Even un-American. But I’m not smart enough to devise a course of action better than simply putting it all in God’s hands. It’s either that or accept that we’re now living in Bizzarro World.

"Warning" by British author Jenny Joseph is a poem famous for its tongue-in-cheek take on growing older:

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple 

With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me, 

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves 

And satin chairs, and say we've no money for butter. 

I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired 

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells 

And run my stick along the public railings 

And make up for the sobriety of my youth . . . .

It’s not exactly a prayer, and my youth was less than sober. But it just might serve as a sop to bring me down to earth after my next mind-numbing phone call with “Klara.”

In the meantime, I’m going to Uber to the train station later so I can chat with the driver before he’s rendered obsolete by a driverless Tesla – owned by a trillionaire who delights in taking a chain saw to other people’s livelihoods.

(Image thanks to The Front Porch by James Milson.)