The constant pings, chimes, whooshes and musical tones from his phone, tablet and laptop are an unwelcome aggravation to the state of perfect harmony that I strive to achieve, as a matter of course, throughout my day.
He has a different jazz melody ringtone to identify each of his family members — as well as a few of his mates — when they call him. And being alert, with a functioning memory, I know who is calling him before he does.
For the young Missus, it’s Burgundy Street Blues — the Acker Bilk version. For one of his mates who once toyed with a trumpet, it’s the opening cadence of Louis’s West End Blues — which explodes in that awesome attack from way back in 1927, and frightens the daylights out of dogs and people two rooms away. For another old mate, it’s John Prine’s Illegal Smile; and for the boys its Bix playing Singin’ The Blues, or Bruce belting out Tougher Than The Rest.
He tells me it puts him in the right kind of mood to take the call. If he’s called by people he doesn’t know, he hears the first few bars of Köln Concert. In other words, he has to gee himself up for something he’d rather not do, which is answer the phone. And since it often wakes me up, I’d rather he didn’t do it either.
What he doesn’t ask himself is whether he needs to do it at all, despite my urgings and splendid example. I never take a call myself and I believe in making my thoughts and feelings known by non-telephonic means, but only when necessary. And I never lose my focus.
The Boss has unkindly remarked that, while my focus is admirably intense, it is limited to food, balls, pats — and food. But I venture to say he could learn a lot from that — he could simplify his life by keeping his phone turned off until, say, after I have been fed at the end of the day; and he could look at his emails all at once, after I have gone to bed.
I can sense there is a part of him that wants to live a simple life, like mine. On the weekend, he was telling me about a new book on Henry Thoreau, the young writer who built a shack in the woods of Massachusetts and spent two years there, living off the land and trying to distance himself from the distractions of modern life.
After his stint there, Thoreau wrote his famous little book, Walden, named after the pond nearby. Thoreau’s meditations on inattention must have unsettled The Boss because he once made the long journey to Concord and Walden Pond and stepped into Thoreau’s modest cottage, now rebuilt to replace the original’s rotten timbers.
If you ask me, it was a long way for him to go to not learn a lesson. But rejecting my sarcasm, he points out that Thoreau didn’t have a dog — not during the two years, two months and two days he spent on Walden Pond, and indeed not ever, on the grounds that a dog was just another distraction.
Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead. But let me remind you that Thoreau was doing all that deep thinking about the distractions of modern life back in 1845 — so The Boss is just another hapless human in a long line of laggardly learners. Woof!
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