change, continued

All this talk of change! Will the real leader for change please stand up? Oh, and the weather? It’s about to change! Time as well. We’ll trade in an hour of time for the perception of the arrival of spring this week-end. Postage rates – I’m at the post office and the clerk is warning me of an imminent change (not so soon! It’s in May and it’s only a penny!). And my age – I'm reading that a local bowling alley offers discounts for seniors, i.e. those 55 or older. That’ll be me next month!

I can’t say that I moved to contribute to this universal shout-out for change. I can offer a very ordinary comment: some change is good. In political leadership, for example. Does anyone doubt that? “More of the same” has never gotten anyone elected, to my knowledge. People always want things to be better. Even as, at this point, people (me included) are desperate for things to be hugely different and therefore, by definition, better.

But walking home this afternoon, I tried to not think about how change sometimes does not happen even as we are ready for it. The melting snow, made mushy by the rains last night, is no longer so mushy. Footprints have turned solid. Sort of like the footprints in concrete at the Grauman's Chinese Theater in L.A. And the idea that we’ll lose our blanket of white became… just an idea. (This week, we can expect more snow.)





And in trying not to think about how cold that 21 degrees felt, what with the wind and all that snow, I thought, instead, about a comment on Ocean – the one about how the reader misses posts about people.

Even though to me, Ocean has to be multifaceted, because life is that way, still, I miss those posts too. I remembered what I jotted down to myself at the age of twelve – I want to be a journalist. (Where did that come from? I was sort of a math nurd.) And still later, when I decided on grad school, it was with the idea that I would become an ethnographer.

Ocean isn’t journalism or ethnography. But it lets me dabble with my unchanging love of the snapshot. Of a life in progress. Preferably not my own. Though, of course, as it presents itself to me.

Anyway, nothing has changed there. Even though my brownie camera and my Smith Corona are no longer trusty nor dusty. They’re just gone. Did I mention that technologies have changed in recent decades?