The relevance of dinosaurs

Kaylee's Pink Dinosaur, with thanks.

Situations arise which remind me I have become a dinosaur.  I have become a quill pen, high-button shoes, a hoop skirt, a car with no computer anything that also requires high octane gas, a 50-cent grilled cheese and Coke lunch at a Woolworth's lunch counter, the lunch counter itself.  I am happy among the unhappy characters of MAD MEN because we are almost contemporaries, my age at the time falling between Sally's and Peggy's. That is a world I knew.  We were alternately baffled and dazzled by protests, a war, assassinations, then men landing on the moon.  I have become a time capsule.

I am happy, though sometimes thwarted, being analog in a digital environment.  In the ways of master craftsmen who preserve and perpetuate skills nearly lost to the machine age, I suspect that some of us are needed to play the role of relics, like directors who still shoot their projects on film.  Arm signals seem, to me, a reasonable method of alerting other drivers to pending turns.  That is not my practice yet it still feels natural, the way my foot sometimes seeks the long-absent clutch.

Products that vanish, businesses that close, remind me that change is inescapable.  Becoming accustomed to it is not the same as becoming comfortable.  I like to talk with service departments on the phone, I get to ask questions and take notes.  I get a name and an extension to call again, should I need to.  The Edison Company still operates this way.  I know from our frequent and on-going power outages.   They may be eligible to join me in the Dinosaur Hall of Fame

Life as I experience it calls to me to seek the wider view, the higher path, the softer response.  It reminds me, in a gentle way, to slow down, do one thing at a time, be in the moment.  It has taught me to value silence, either by refraining from speaking all my thoughts or by sitting still and doing what appears to be nothing.  There is no up side to being in a hurry, nor any I can find for what I refuse to refer to, except in this instance, as multi-tasking.  Even when young, I believed I heard a different drummer.  I had no idea just how different it would become.