Isn’t the wish to have things simple a wish assigned to the old? And is it a wish only about technology?
What young person has ever said,” Why is everything so complicated these days? I can’t figure out my cellphone. Give me the old landline with the clunky receiver?”
Well, maybe one has, but I’m not around young people and so I don’t know. When I was young I certainly never wished for simplicity. I never thought of it. “Simplicity” was the name of a pattern company, and I preferred “Vogue.” I made things—clothes—many many of them—and complicated ones, gowns, suits.
I don’t sew any more: they’ve oversimplified the patterns and I, an old woman now, have too many complications in my joints and dexterity and, even, patience.
I look back on my life—good lord, how tiresome is it, I do it too much! Does anyone want to hear it all?—and wonder at the complications I absorbed: teaching English classes, directing and choreographing the high school musicals, taking my kids to lessons, painting the house—the inside walls and rooms—even the total outside except for the back of the house, which was two levels and the stepladder scared me. I hired my son and his friend, brave teenage boys, to finish the job. I was always trying trying to hold it all together. Dating, running off. Grad school. Was that simplicity?
My life is far too simple now. It’s just me, now, no one to even run those old scenes against: Do you remember. . . ? Yes! Do you?
I truly miss the complications of getting dressed, being able to be dressed. I wish I could still tuck a blouse into a straight skirt and hold the two together with a pretty belt. I wish I could wear hose and high heels. I wish I had suits that I could wear to please a man, always look good in. There was a complication, I guess, of components involved, but a simplicity in style, in ability to wear style. I wonder that today no one dresses up—always jeans, wrinkled shirts, sneakers, those awful shorts young men wear that come to the knee. That’s all too simple; they have nothing to wish for.
I have to schedule complications now. I have to invite people to cook for and give it the elegant title of “dinner party,” arrange for a time and place to spend an extravagant amount of money to have a lunch or a dinner in a restaurant with company beyond myself. I have to get on planes and trains and buses to complicate a life that is so simple I wonder how to sustain it if I don’t work at it. So, instead of annotating texts and scripts, I annotate a calendar, attempting to fill in “things to do” to give life meaning.
I’m old, but I don’t wish for things to be simpler. It’s true that I can’t figure out some stuff, but who cares? I can call someone, if I remember to charge my phone. Which I do.