15. This Plastic Age

I lived the early years of my life in a daze and I think most normal children do—at least I hope so. Even right under my parents’ eyes, I was never where they thought I was. For example, I had just finished reading eighteen volumes of Muhlbach and I was quite ready to take my place in the royal courts of Europe. When gorgeous courtesans were mentioned as mistresses of crowned heads, I thought that meant that they were just good friends. I was steeped in intrigue, court etiquette, and artificialities, and it was showing on me. Father had begun to call me “the duchess.” I rather liked it. I was no different from the majority of Americans who, it is said, would like to have the title honor system in this country. I believe this is true because almost every newspaper contains lists, and pictures, of various young ladies competing for the titles of Cotton or Cantaloupe Queen, or Pickle or Pumpkin Princess.

I did not suspect that calling me “the duchess” was Father’s clever way of saying I was beginning to be awfully hoity-toity. I was entering that strange mixed-up age when no one understands you because you don’t understand yourself. I also was brooding with Edgar Allan Poe. I was sure no other poet could so artfully guide the English language, so that it left a melody in the mind—a melody so strangely lacking in his prose. I admired the graceful phrasing of Moore, the narrative ability of Tennyson, and the rough ruggedness of Kipling, Service, and Bret Harte. None of my friends liked poetry, so I had to keep bottled and corked.

I was at the age when fine, upright, and loving parents long to take a stick of stove wood and bash you one. During this blasé phase Father—surfeited with some artificial show of mine—remarked, “My dear, a man can walk on his hands instead of his feet, but he doesn’t do it very well, because it isn’t natural. We want you to be well informed, but we want you to guard against affectation, or any laurels you may win will wither on your brow.” After that, whenever I felt a fastidious moment coming on, I heard the soft rustle of the unearned laurels, as they readied themselves to languish and droop away before they had even been donned. It was sort of weird. Truly good parents have a tough go of it and they cry out in their wilderness for longanimity on their weary road.

Since my thirteenth birthday I had been attending school at St. Mary’s in Dallas and at Welch Academy in Houston—that is, I was there intermittently as most of the time I was traveling about with Mother and Father. They thought nothing of taking me out of school for months at a time. My mind was taking a serious turn now and I wanted very much to go to college but Mother and Father decided to send me to what is known as a “finishing school” in Washington, D.C. The curriculum included sight-seeing and the theater. I shall never forget having the opportunity of seeing The Merry Widow at just the right age so the memory of its melodies can linger with me throughout my life. Time thieves away at physical beauty but it cannot rob the memory.

Broadly speaking, among our friends, girls had stayed at home until their upkeep was shifted from father to husband. If a girl didn’t marry, then her family was “stuck” with her and she usually lived with a branch of the family where she could, perhaps, be useful. Most houses had a pale old aunt, or attic widow, tucked away under the eaves. But now girls were beginning to see the light of emancipation, and careers were beginning to have a definite lure. Careers meant special preparation and college graduates had the advantage over finishing-school girls. I saw the broadening opportunities presented by a college diploma but Father disapproved of the idea. He could only visualize a college graduate, at that time, as a remote near-sighted girl, devoid of social graces, wearing mannish clothes, and given to heckling. This was also the current popular conception, and cartoonists, who are never Ethelred the Unready, were having a joyous fling at this opinion.

To end the subject Father said, “Besides I can certainly take care of you.” I wanted to take care of my self.

In ransacking the past I remember that the school in Washington was amused because I was taking riding lessons (we wore divided skirts which were the stepping stones between side-saddle habits and riding breeches). It was amused because, I’ve since learned, when one is from Texas he is supposed to be part horse. I have felt the restrained dismay of my hosts on English estates where I have been led off to their stables and been expected to make informed comments about their nags. To me a horse is just a good-looking horse, or he isn’t. If the master and groom begin talking about hocks, gaskins, stifles, cannons, or pasterns, I turn away befogged and look for the comfort of a friendly dog to pat or shake hands with.

The always feeble threads of peace broke that first year while I was in Washington. The outstanding event was the sinking of the Lusitania. It directly affected several girls at school, otherwise I did not think much about the coming war as I plunked away on my ukulele. Most Americans were like penguins. They felt no fear because nothing grave had threatened them externally since 1775, but I did know several boys who had volunteered with the Canadian and British forces and gone overseas. In the interest of trivia but truth, had anyone asked me to name my most important accomplishments that year I probably would have included in my list that I had learned how to dance the “Bunny Hug” and how to make the new French salad dressing—mayonnaise.

After I returned home we listened with forlorn intensity to the roar of history, and I remember longing to be useful and feeling extremely inadequate as I made bandages at the Red Cross in my long hobble skirt. Two of Uncle Alfred’s sons had been killed in the war, and Father’s face as he read the news, revealed how his heart ached for his brother.

Father was ailing now and he died before the war was over. It was such a sad time to go. The keystone had fallen from the family arch and no one could replace it. I have thought of him every day of my life since losing him, and always with a smile or with a feeling of gratefulness, that I was given so rich an experience in my life with him. I wish parents everywhere could realize how important they can be to their children.

In reviewing Father’s life I cannot help but be impressed with the magnitude of the infinitesimal. Because a man did not want to cut off his lovely curls, Father got a remarkably fine education, which he tried to pass on to his children according to the extent of their ability to absorb it. Because a ship sailed for North America instead of a less advantageous port, Father was caught up in the bright future of a young country. Because he wanted a ticket “forty dollars west,” he was first made aware of the opportunities that lay ahead. Because he could “write good,” he was delayed in a part of the country where his qualifications were most useful. Because of carelessness in the guiding of a plough, he was made conscious of his ineptness as a farmer and this changed the whole course of his life.

I suppose there is no such thing as a trifle. Perhaps all we have to do is to be ready and prepared, then the fates handle our lives in just this way while we delude ourselves that we are running our own show.

I have said nothing about my reactions when I saw the first telephone, that great, manly, wooden thing, operated by a small metal crank that you could twirl urgently, hesitantly, or lazily as the mood of your message dictated. Neither have I mentioned my reaction when I saw the first automobile, or airplane, because there was no reaction. I am not full of undigested technical knowledge. I have never had any, digested or undigested, and shamefacedly I must admit, I have practically no scientific curiosity. But it is debasing to one’s ego to spend a whole lifetime in ignorance wondering why certain things do the certain things they do because you have pressed a certain button.

Living in this plastic age of synthetics—of drip-dry materials, prefabricated items, tape recorders, machines with electronic brains, satellite communications, instants, and their little kinlets—zippers, Kleenex, Scotch tape, ice cubes, the lot—I am devoutly grateful for my particular string of years, for the simple reason that in my young life we had none of these dreamed-up things which I know are not “necessities,” but instead are something to enjoy as luxuries. How can this young generation appreciate these wonders? How can they appreciate ice cream ladled out to them, in the way that we did, who had to turn a crank to make our own?

I have talked by telephone in mid-ocean from the majestic Queen Elizabeth—and I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that a little spark that ignites from a mere drop of gasoline can propel a car, or a truck, or jet plane, carrying hundreds of pounds of cargo. You can see that I inherited my grandfather’s theory that there could be no such thing as a bicycle. This is as pure a case of atavism as you need, to put stuffing into the definition. It makes the century between him and me seem quite transient, but he died with his convictions steady, while mine have become shaky.

Now let’s see where we have got to—oh, radios. When radios came on the market I just listened to them and ignored any thought about their internal equipment. If anyone tried to explain any of these things to me, he lost me at about the third sentence. I just considered radios as the last straw, especially the ones in automobiles that go chattering along with us, whether we go slow or fast. Once I tried to see if I could run out from under a program, and a motorcycle policeman took on a vague expression as he listened to my explanation; but he was sweet about it and said I had made the day interesting. And television? Black and white or colored, which as another last straw, doesn’t matter much, because the camel has long since collapsed. Since we are only guests of existence between birth and death—such a short span of impermanence—why should we try to do everything in just one generation? I mock humanity’s onward rush!

Another thing, how do we know that, any minute, some interplanetary projectile isn’t going to clip the buckle off the world’s belt? If we are knocked into a cocked hat we are all going to feel pretty silly standing around calling each other blithering idiots.

Is an old-fashioned Dark Age about due to trip us up and slow down our headlong speed toward—what? Are the scientists of the world building Frankensteins? Does thinking too much damage the brain? Do you, too, sometimes regret the invention of the wheel? Anyway as I pass the large glass windows of a hospital’s nursery, I look at the rows of new-born babies, and I feel a pip of comfort because these ignorant babies are born just knowing absolutely nothing at all.

Truly our inventions have given us a physical Utopia without our really being aware of it. What else can we possibly need, or want, except softer sidewalks, soup bowls with sloping bottoms, instant-drying washcloths for travelers, magic wands to solve the parking problem, or typewriters that can spell? And yet we must go to the moon. Creative people live without boundaries and man’s ambition is like that bird, the huma, that never lights. If one thing emerges more clearly than another it is this: when return-trip tickets to the moon are eventually on sale and are underwritten by insurance companies, we will see a period of dense migration that will make the California gold rush, or the Oklahoma land grab, look like a slow trickle of cold molasses—and it will disrupt all present thinking. And if they hurry I shall be no further back than seventh in line, ticket in hand.

It is now almost impossible to amaze anyone and so the thought of reaching the moon is not so preposterous in this informed age as the idea Columbus had in his day of sailing across a sea of mystery into pure conjecture.

All these inventions! What a mess of them! In the eons past the habits of man changed slowly, melting, blending from one era into another. But those of my age have come into a span of years where living conditions of all kinds have changed so abruptly, where obsolescence sets in so rapidly, that there is little in common—and almost no connection—between our own infancy and our present.

From my windows (which are not so far away from the setting at the beginning of this record) I look over an air-conditioned city and I see jets streaking acrosss the sky and occasionally I hear one of them breaking the sound barrier. What is that old story about a certain musical note played fortissimo that can shatter a glass goblet? Sometimes small significances, that lurk under odd similitudes, are laid on to alert one. See what I mean?

When I really want to awe myself I think about the fact that only one generation ago, Mother saw friendly or marauding Indians roaming these same acres. Ah! it was a wonderful, uncontaminated country when the Indians had it, although it was only a near-run thing, but at least it cost nothing to live here. When they got hungry they just moved to where there was something growing that was edible, or they just shot something with bows and arrows—there was no gory business about having guns on. At all times their meals were either here, or there, moving over the land, and that’s the reason they had to pack up and rove so much.

The atomic age is now “pranking around with a razor,” and bearing down on us, and will probably continue to cause even more of a larky-do than Benjamin Franklin did, when he tied that key to that kite. What is so astonishing is that anyone ever considered some of these inventions as possibilities. Someday they may decide to cross the infallible brains of an IBM and a robot and then where will man be, I ask you? There is no doubt that these chaps with source minds are peculiar. The resources of their scientific minds may never become exhausted, and no telling what else we are in for. I suppose all we can do about it, is to try to learn to accept them with quiet minds.

Had the human race depended on the likes of me for inventions we would still be tree-living primates, or sneaking around with big, thorny clubs, or sitting glumly on damp cold stones. On second thought I might have thought of putting a handle on a coffee pot.