|
|
 |
|
of the 21st Century |
 I think the world has ended!" |
Great-Grandma might feel
Armageddon had come
of TheColumnists.com
My long-dead, great-grandmother, whom I knew quite well, was someone you could really call a “character” and I’ve often pondered how she would react if magically set down in the middle of a typical modern day.
Some things I can guess with a fair amount of accuracy. If she made it through the first stupefying few minutes she would have run to the telephone as fast as her 84 year-old legs could carry her. She would then call the vice squad, the ambulance, the police, and the president of the United States.
The vice squad would be needed to clean up the near-nakedness of the girls milling around the high school grounds that now cover many acres directly across from her old house.
The ambulance would be for all those about to be mangled on the nightmare racetrack someone had built practically in their front yard. Strange machines of all descriptions were flashing past in a dizzying blur.
It would take the police to do something about the 50 per cent of those same machines sending forth crashing waves of raucous, un-natural sound.
The president should be notified that the end of the world had come and gone, and where was Heaven? This place looks suspiciously like the “other place.”
Then she would head for the root cellar in case there was more destruction to come.
Grandma couldn’t make those phone calls because she wouldn’t recognize the telephone. She would probably suppose the modern instruments were some kind of other worldly apparatus designed by Satan. The last one she had seen was a single earpiece with a hook that hung on a little black box on the wall.
Maybe, on her way to the root cellar, she would have checked out the radio to discover what she might hear about the apparent Dooms Day events. However, if the old and familiar were completely missing, today’s radio would be a foreign object too. What news could possibly be reported from a football-shaped thing-a-ma-jig with a long silver wire coming out the top?
What if she came upon a TV, a turned on TV? Well, she would just have to kill it, that’s all.
Grandma’s closet would contain the unknown also, with only a bunch of slacks in colors like pink and lavender. Never would she believe they were for her, or, any other woman. They had to be for the men, who must have lost all sense of propriety during the recent Armageddon. And what unpleasant surprises all those pullover tops would be, with the printing all over them. Who were the Seattle Mariners, anyway?
Then Grandma might find some things that would cause her to rethink her belief that Heaven was far away. The water pouring freely out of a chrome knob in the kitchen definitely spoke of angelic intervention; the little room with the flushing mechanism even more. She might conclude that life in the Upper Spheres came in small doses, giving us time to acclimatize ourselves to all that watery beauty.
By the time Grandma uncovered more wonders of the modern age she would have been emotionally drained, but fairly certain she wasn’t in the “hot place” OR, Heaven.
There were all those unbelievable improvements and inventions that made life so much easier, so it couldn’t be Hell, and yet the population resembled a great, over-active anthill…with every member striving to out-complain the others. To my way of thinking, that’s about as far from an angelic culture as you can get.
No, Grandma wouldn’t know where she was. I, on the other hand, know exactly where she is. And the rest of this is just “S’posin.”
© 2002 by Audrey Yeager.
The caricature drawing of Audrey Yeager is © 2001 by Jim
Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Audrey Yeager. To send an
email, click here: talkback@thecolumnists.com
| Home | About Us | Archives | Talkback | Shopping Mall |