Plastic Rectangular Windows
Losing my digital calendar to the ethers caused me to reflect on the humble paper calendar from childhood, a rather dull memory. Aside from having to remove it from the wall to write or erase, it was a simple item that everybody had. Not only was it a memory tool, it was a way to show visitors how busy or involved one was. In my house, birthdays, anniversaries and confident, upcoming vacations earned the pen, any color, while other entries were treated by pencil, just in case. Naturally, the only person allowed to mark it was my mother.
Recalling the benign is like remembering the kid with bright red hair in third grade. Unless cued, the memory of this person is dormant. After all, there’s more than enough non-meaningful debris crammed into our relatively small skulls these days. And digital everything is supposed to be the medicine.
An iPhone update that digested the entirety of my Google calendar prompted me to recall the paper calendar. The nervy Apple process didn’t even regurgitate the lost times and dates elsewhere and believe me, I searched. I Googled, I backtracked, I scanned subreddits and Apple communities, but to no avail. After letting go of hope, I printed basic, monthly grids, asked people for their birthdates and relied on reminder texts and calls for various appointments.
Part of evolution involves revamping the clumsy tools of old. Like gorillas extracting ants with shoots of grass, or crows fetching twigs that unlock cascading puzzles for raw cubes of meat, we too grapple towards logical efficiency. Through trial and error learning and experimentation there is little room for potential blunders, human, cyber or otherwise. The most recent iterations of mainstream props arrive without much buzz, appear to relieve clutter, streamline life’s chores and offer promises of more free time.
In this environment, questioning whether older is better isn’t even on the digital whiteboard and public wondering exposes the field marks of certain demographics. Best to let it go until the next upgrade. This is nothing new.
Our calendar on Silvermine Road in New Canaan, Connecticut dangled on a delicate push pin next to our beige, Western Electric wall phone in the kitchen. Twelve numbered push buttons had replaced the round dial on the mounted component of the phone. Below the grid of buttons was an odd rectangular window covered by a brittle piece of plastic that had turned a brownish yellow because of my parent’s cigarette smoke.
The plastic piece functioned as a protective cover for the same-sized sliver of thick paper with no obvious access. That’s where you wrote your own phone number, once you took the phone apart. This bland, insignificant memory left me wondering if we forgot our own phone numbers because maybe life was that frenetic. We recited our ten or seven digits constantly. No one questioned parents smoking up a storm inside a car with all the windows up or the importance of writing our own phone numbers on our own telephones.
The rectangular windows became useless and without question were lost to time. So many things are.
