Stay Gold, Grandma

I've been away from my post for a while, home visiting friends and family and taking a much needed break from the trudging day to day life of the city, and most importantly to celebrate my grandmother's 87 birthday. It's a annual affair, an excuse for the whole family to get together and spend a long weekend at the beach in early August. At this point in her life, as morbid as it might sound, we also never know which one will be the last, so each celebration outdoes the one before, having to be successively larger to be duly extravagant for Grandma's "final blowout." She, of course, being oblivious to the macabre designations of each years party, has come to expect that we outdo ourselves, and continues to outlive our ability to invent exciting new gags.

This year, as our aging family tried yet again to find something to do with my timeless Grandmother, she, bored with our vacation lethargy, asked my younger cousin to drive her to the bar to watch the rest of the Red Sox game. While she doesn't quite follow which team is up to bat or when the images on the screen are replays or live action, she knows that as long as the score after the Red Sox name is higher, things are going well. My cousin, who as a newly licensed driver and the only one of our family who is not yet 21, has happily taken on a job as family chauffeur, and cautiously but skillfully navigated us to the nearby seafood restaurant where the bar, decorated in a collectors dream of Boston memorabilia, had the game viewable from any angle on multiple TVs. My grandmother, who is a huge fan of Broadway, growing up in the Roaring Twenties when preforming in the big shows in New York was every young flappers dream, was advised by her mother to "Never have to be asked to perform," and subsequently has expected a similar outlook from not just her grandchildren, but the general public. She attributes this, and I'm inclined to agree, to that fact that she was raised in an era before the so-called social alienation brought on by the "Ipod Generation," when going up to someone who you didn't know didn't elicit a sneer and an expectation that you were selling something. Needless to say, immediately upon entering the restaurant, she told everyone in sight that it was her birthday, and elicited surprised smiles and a variety of responses, from "congratulations" to "god bless yous." She would always accept these graciously, but upon turning around would mutter with a smile that they could have sang, or that their singing "could have had a bit more oomph." She even asked the waiter if he could get the bar to sing a short rendition of Happy Birthday, which to my surprise he was able to do.

Now of course it is hard to not be enamored by an older woman dressed in a pink suit with a birthday hat and a sparkling wand, but still this kind of public openness and the willingness with which it was received made me think about how rarely we interact with the people that are around us everyday and yet are practically non-entities in our everyday lives. Everyone who has ever been in food service has heard a thousand stories of customers who treat their servers rudely, or perhaps even worse, as if they were another computerized interface that people have to deal with to get what they want. People have become so used to ordering food through a speaker, taking money from an ATM, and finding information or buying products online, that people often don't seem to value the human element when they interact with people in service positions. Many people would actually rather order online than be faced with what has become almost a nerve-wracking process of human interaction. And that is the scariest thing; people who have become so cut off from normal everyday interactions with people that they don't remember (or never knew) how to carry on simple conversations with strangers, other than the pre-programmed "What can I get you today" or "Would you like a bag for that." Will kids who grow up interacting with computer screens and listening to MP3 players on subways eventually need lessons on day to day communication that were once given simply by going to the local grocery store or meeting kids in the park for a baseball game? Now if its not texted, its not worth being said, and even those monosyllabic messages are the most basic information: Where, when, who, what, and then rendezvous for a movie, and then say goodbye, texting about how it went to each other later. My grandmother, on the other hand, who doesn't understand "whose internet" I am surfing when I connect somewhere other than my house, had a restaurant full of otherwise self-indulged patrons looking up from the messages in the bottom of their drinks to smile, sing, and form a human connection with a complete stranger for a few minutes on her birthday. That being said, she doesn't have 500 Facebook friends...