It's an age of innovation, praise the Lord

The Column: 08.31.22

One of the problems of living a long life is that you lose track of who is famous now. I, for example, have no idea who Adele is. I could mention other unknown celebs but I forget their names. Most of the famous people I know are dead, such as Abraham Lincoln, Al Kaline, A.J. Liebling, and Alexander Graham Bell, just to mention a few on the A list, and Adele is a complete blank. So is the famous singer-songwriter Taylor Speed. She is huge among young people with beautiful hair and I don’t know her from a waitress at White Castle. She could walk up to me on the street and say, “Hi, Garrison, it’s me, Taylor” and I’d have to stand there and feign familiarity and sneak out my phone and snap a picture of her and use my facial recognition app to give me the name. Swift. Not Speed. Swift.

On the other hand, growing old, you’re stunned by the beautiful innovations all around us — FaceTime and Shazam and MeTube and Google, the Dairy Queen Blizzard, the Unsubscribe function on junk email, and the defibrillator embedded in my chest, upper left, that makes me imagine I have a pack of Luckies in my pocket: these more than make up for being out of the celebrity loop.

I have an AlexaPlus app on my phone that keeps track of people I know and if I’m having lunch with Marnie today, it reminds me that she has three grandkids, one of them a genius, that she’s had knee replacement surgery, is agnostic, from Des Moines, is bitter about the divorce from Jerry, and is estranged from her daughter Lona over political differences — Marnie uses the pronoun “we” and Lona refers to her as “it” — and how Alexa knows this, I don’t want to know.

When you get old, you find that you have a few friends and you know hundreds of people slightly, so it’s good to have AlexaPlus to lean on. I go for a walk using GPS and FRT and through my hearing aid Alexa says, “There’s a curb three steps ahead and in fifty feet there’s a pile of dog poop. The smiling woman approaching you is your upstairs neighbor Melissa. The man with her is not her husband. She says he’s a cousin. I have my doubts.”

This, to me, is the real beauty of the hearing aid. You can take phone calls through it, and you can use your BioBot app to identify trees and birds and breeds of dogs. I was an English major in college and lived most of my life in abject ignorance of the natural world and now, walking with my wife in the park, when she says, “Look. A sugar maple.” I click the clicker in my pocket and say, “No, it’s a black tupelo. You can tell by the red leaves and the berries. And the two birds are Blackburnian warblers, both male. Young. They migrate, navigating by starlight, and get confused by city lights and many die in collisions with windows.”

She is impressed by my tone of authority. Old men tend to dither and speak in generalities and BioBot lets me narrate with the authority of a park ranger. It feels good. Statistics show that a sense of authority increases a man’s testosterone by 38 percent and testosterone is a powerful deterrent of dementia and it can reverse hearing loss.

I don’t want to be a know-it-all so I don’t use the AmHist or TheoPhilo or PoliSci apps, but I do sometimes employ Happy App, which, tuned in to the conversation and surveilling the physical landscape, feeds me relevant jokes. The app spots a dog and it whispers, “So the dog walked into the bar and said, ‘How about a drink for a talking dog?’ and the bartender said, ‘Sure. The toilet is down the hall, first door on the left.’” Or it sees a blond and says, “There was a blond who carried a transparent lunch box so she could tell if she was going to work or coming home.”

There is also the Fact app, also known as the BS app because Boy Scouts are truthful. It makes a low hum when it detects dishonesty and as lie is piled on lie, the tone rises to a squawk and then a shriek. I don’t use the app because I find it annoying.

Any questions? Comments? Click HERE if you want me to shut up.

Garrison Keillor July 2022

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