My two-cents worth and then some. An online journal by LP Brown.

Posts Written By L Parker Brown

Extolling the Joy of Friendship

by on ·Aging, Friendship, School Days

Last night I received a wonderful surprise. I could have done a happy dance, but my bad knee wasn’t having it. The surprise was a phone call from my long-time best friend, Loretta. We are septuagenarians now, but we’ve known each other since we were young teenagers. Yeah, that long ago.

We have the same first name, although she nicknamed me Retsie when we were in high school. Nevertheless,  we called each other Sis back then, and still do. In our yesteryears, I knew her family members, and she knew mine. We have shared memories from our high school years, like the time when she and I got called to the principal’s office for circulating a petition demanding that students be allowed to wear sneakers to school (or tennis shoes as they were frequently called back then). That’s right, as shy as I was, that was my initial baby step toward social activism.

Loretta and I had a third “sister” in our clique while in high school, Valerie. I knew Valerie years before I met Loretta. Our friendship went back to grade school. It was through Valerie that I met another life-long friend, Phillip. Phil, as we call him, was a real-life friend before he became one of my Facebook friends.

Sadly, Valerie died in 2004. Anyone who has lost a close friend will know what I mean when I say it is like losing a family member. Over time, our losses may get easier. We learn to live with them, but the space a dear person held in our heart remains forever vacant.

After graduating from high school, time, distance, and life-stage transitions separated our trio, but Loretta, Valeria, and I remained in touch through phone calls and Christmas cards. On at least one or two occasions, I babysat Loretta’s children before having children of my own.

Valerie and I lost contact for a few years but reconnected in 2001. During that time, she persuaded me to attend our 35th high school reunion. I was happy that we spent that time together. Sadly, Valerie died of breast cancer the week before Christmas, 2004.

The last time that Loretta and I saw each other was at Valerie’s funeral. We vowed then to maintain closer contact, but our life journeys intervened again. About ten years ago, I misplaced Loretta’s phone number and lost touch with her. Still, I thought of her often and prayed that she was well and that we would reconnect.

When cell phones became popular, I wasn’t one of those people who gave up my landline and I kept the same number for over 40 years. Fortunately, Loretta, kept that number, too, and the answer to my prayer came when she called me last night. Reunited, we reminisced, laughed, and carried on like high schoolers. We also plan to get together in the near future.

Anyone who has a lifelong best friend understands the joy of growing together over the years with someone who knows you almost as well as you know yourself. What beats having a close friend who knows your early history? High School. Dating and boyfriends. Marriages. Children. Divorces. Some friendships are short-lived; others last a lifetime. But, there is nothing like having a lifelong best friend and confidant with whom you can have candid conversations and who knows your thoughts on most issues even before you express them. A friend who understands your moods, who shares your low spells and the high points. A friend who knows your flaws and accepts your imperfections without being judgmental. A friend who, after a disagreement, has no problem saying, “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong.” A friend who moves on without carrying grudges. I have and have had friends like that.

Unfortunately, like most people my age, I mourn the loss of many dear friends – male and female – who have preceded me in death, and I appreciate every day that I can spend time with those friends who are still around.

As author Edna Buchanon says, “Friends are the family we choose for ourselves.”

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Entertaining Deep Thoughts

by on ·Food for Thought, Opinion, The Way I See It

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.” Stephen Hawking.

I read somewhere that the typical Pisces is extremely introspective. Don’t I know it. My brain seems to always be on hyperdrive, even when I’m sleeping in dreamland.

I contemplate everything. It baffles me that people spend hundreds of dollars on cut-out jeans simply because they are fashionable. And I wonder why birthdays are counted in years instead of days; especially since a day can sometimes seem like a lifetime. I humorously consider that someone who turns 50 on their birthday would be 18250 days old. Then, I imagine trying to fit those figures on a line on a form with only enough space for three digits.

Often my philosophy wavers between believing in predestination and the idea that we are all autonomous beings fueled by self-determination.

Some people ascribe to the doctrine that a Higher Power foreordains everything and that the script of our life is assigned when we are born. As we age, we think that we can control our destiny when we may not. What if we only believe that we have free will because part of the master plan is to let us think that we do?

Consider the epigraph The Appointment in Samarra. Are we always where we are supposed to be at any given time?

Another example. Say that a man is running late for an appointment. He rushes out of the building and anxiously tries to flag a taxi. A cab stops a couple of feet away from him. As he begins walking toward it, another man who had just approached the scene rudely rushes past the first man and hurries into the cab. The driver pulls off and proceeds on the green light into the intersection and is broadsided by a box truck that has run the light. Both the cab driver and passenger are badly injured. Was it predestination that the man from who the cab was stolen avoided the accident?

If someone commits suicide, was it predestined that the person would die that way, or was their free will, their intent to take control, the determining factor in when and how death would occur? Relevant to death, was euthanasia proponent Dr. Jack Kevorkian, an assigned architect of good or a force of evil? Everything is relative, isn’t it?

Do things unfurl in life the way they are supposed to, or is everything happenstance? Are our hopes, dreams, and plans already inbred or assigned to us before we are born, and do we merely follow the script once we are here?

I frequently consider how our thoughts, words, and actions, good or bad, sometimes have extensive reach. The things we say or do can benefit or harm others, often without our knowledge, subsequently a domino effect.

In these contemporary times, it seems that everything and everyone is interrelated far and wide. For example, random hookups that result in childbirths, artificial inseminations, and surrogacies make blood ties far-reaching. Consequently, brothers and sisters, cousins, and other blood relatives can unknowingly develop a physical or sexual love connection without knowing that they are related.

Occasionally, I entertain the idea that we, all of humankind, are on a universal chessboard. Depending on our social and economic status in life, we are the kings, queens, bishops, rooks, and pawns that provide entertainment for the omnipotent powers that be.

Sometimes I am inclined to agree with Shakespeare. Were he alive to paraphrase a line that he gave to Hamlet, he might say of my perpetual curiosity, “The lady doth overthink too much, methinks.”

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A Time to Laugh

by on ·Religion, The Way I See It

People joke about God having a sense of humor. I’ve done it, too. But, something happened to convince me that not only does God have a sense of humor, He sometimes uses humor to shake us up.

This morning – I am saying my a.m. prayers and have progressed to “hallowed be Thy name” when my mind begins to wander. Should I have Hazelnut or Arabica Dark Roast coffee with breakfast? Unfortunately, it is not unusual for my thoughts to stray when I’m saying my prayers. The Lord knows that I sometimes have the attention span of a two-year-old with ADD. I force myself to refocus and get back to the business at hand. I apologize to the Lord and start over as I always do whenever my prayer is interrupted.

“Our Father…” I get as far as “Thy will be done,” seconds before my cell phone pings on the nightstand beside the bed, indicating that I have a text message. I ignore the phone and apologize again for the interruption before restarting the prayer.

As I ask God to “Give us this day,” a loud, horn-honking car alarm goes off outside my bedroom window. Son of a biscuit eater, I think, then add Sorry, Lord.

I begin again and manage to finish praying without any more interruptions. And then the strangest thing happens. I turn on the TV to watch the news while making my bed. The set is tuned to the channel it was on when I turned it off last night. Grey’s Anatomy is on. Then comes the kicker.

Dr. Miranda Bailey (one of Grey’s key characters) stands before an altar holding glowing candles in the chapel. She stretches her arms to her sides, raises her head toward heaven, and begins to pray. She says, “Lord,” but before she can utter another word, a coworker arrives by her side and begins chattering. Although the intrusion is brief, Dr. Bailey’s frustration is evident. When the coworker leaves, Bailey turns back toward the altar and is about to resume her prayer.

“Lord,” she says again. Then she is interrupted by the phone inside the pocket of her smock. She pulls out the phone, glares at it, and sighs in frustration as the show goes to a commercial.

I am a little bit rattled by the parallel between what I just saw and my earlier experience while trying to finish my prayer. I pick up the remote control and change the channel while thinking how strange it was that the TV happened to be on that station and showing that particular scene. I don’t believe in coincidences. Surely, God was jesting, about my apologizing for the interruptions. In addition to wrath, mercy, and love, He does have a sense of humor.

Religion – like politics – is a touchy subject. Many people refrain from discussing those two topics because the conversation can turn from an interesting discussion to a nasty argument before you can say Hail Mary.

I am not a religious person, nor am I an atheist. I am spiritual. People who don’t understand my philosophy would likely label me a Christian atheist, but I reject that label.

Sometimes, when discussing the subject, I use the words religious and spiritual interchangeably because it’s easier and less time-consuming than explaining my viewpoint. As I see it, religion is a detailed tradition of organized beliefs and regulated practices shared by a like-minded community and often led and controlled by a person or person(s) who consider themselves called or appointed by God.

Being spiritual is having a one-on-one relationship with God or whatever one chooses to call the Supreme Being. Therefore, I do not feel compelled to have an intermediary or middle person – another imperfect mortal –interpret, explain, or orchestrate their understanding of the Higher Power to attempt to drive me to think their way.

People who claim to be spiritual instead of religious are not necessarily agnostic or atheist. On the contrary, many of us are God-fearing Christians. We just don’t want to be affiliated with religious institutions and groupthink that impacts people’s free will and common sense—shades of Jim Jones, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, and Heaven’s Gate. And we do believe in prayer.

As author Stan Toler says, “You don’t necessarily need a great sense of humor to get God’s punch lines. You just need a great sense of faith.”

Amen.

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Creeping Normalcy

by on ·Food for Thought, Opinion, The Way I See It

Is there such a thing as normal anymore?  Or is normalcy, like beauty – in the eye of the beholder? I often wonder about that.

It was easier to comprehend things when I was much younger (darn near a hundred years ago). It didn’t require a rocket scientist mentality or a Ph.D. in political correctness to determine what was normal and what wasn’t. Back then, we learned in school that two plus two equals four. Nowadays, even that is arguable. Ask a scientist or mathematician, and that person might tell you that two plus two doesn’t necessarily equal four. Then, they’ll go on to explain that significant figures and rounding could produce a different answer. For gosh sake, I am not delving any further into that. Anyone who wants additional information about the quandary of two plus two had best start doing their research.

The conversion from normalcy to the existing status quo sometimes annoys me. Things that once fit neatly into boxes now bulge and punch holes through the container. I like the way a friend of mine described the situation when we were discussing it recently. He said, “Society is on the downstroke. The best days are behind us.”

My favorite television show is The View. The women on the program are intelligent, courageous, and outspoken. They don’t give a flying squirrel whether the public agrees with what they say, nor do they hold back on voicing their opinion. Even when they have a co-host or guest on the show whose ideas I strongly disagree with, who I feel is teetering on the border of idiocy, I still respect that person’s right to voice their opinion.

Like The View’s co-hosts, I am not bothered by people’s judgment of my viewpoint. However, I am astute enough to know that there are times when it is prudent to be diplomatic instead of shooting from the hip. I feel sorry for people who are so afraid of expressing what they honestly think because they fear that being candid will make them look bad, biased, or bonkers in the eyes of their relatives or friends. So, they suppress their true feelings and deny what they are really thinking. Then, later they silently fume about what they wish they had said. Been there. Done that. Years ago. Ain’t doing it no mo’. (Okay, I got a bit carried away there. But isn’t that the freedom of journaling?)

Getting back to the topic. I miss the days when if I received an unexpected wedding invitation from an acquaintance who I didn’t know very well, I didn’t have to wonder if it would be a heterosexual or same-sex marriage. Of course, the gender of the partners will not determine whether or not I attend the wedding. I don’t care who weds who. But, the fact that I don’t care about the gender of the couple doesn’t stop me from wondering. With the growing trend of parents giving their children unisex names, guessing the gender of someone’s S.O. isn’t as easy as it used to be. For example, if a wedding invitation reads, “… joyfully invite you to the wedding of Blair and Blake” or “the honor of your presence is requested at the marriage of Casey and Hunter,” there may be cause for pause. Suppose I want to buy the couple a set of engraved coffee mugs or embroidered gift towels; in order not to commit a faux pas, I need to know whether to buy “His and Hers, His and His or Hers and Hers.”

And look at families. As I see it, there is no such thing anymore as a normal family. Okay, I suddenly sense that using the word normal will be like pouring rubbing alcohol on a bleeding, open wound in some folks. So let’s strike it. Perhaps, in this instance, traditional is a more acceptable word to use. Traditional families like I used to see on TV programs during my generation’s younger days. Families like Father Knows Best, The Partridge Family, Good Times, and even The Jeffersons are what I mean by traditional families. They used to be referred to as nuclear families. I wonder, is the term “nuclear family” taboo now, too?

Traditional or contemporary families are more on par with This is Us and  Modern Family.

When I was a child, I had friends who may have had one or two step-siblings living in their home. Aside from the step-siblings, the children in the house all had the same last name. (Sometimes the step-kids did, too.) According to a study by Cassandra Dorius, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, “One in five of all American moms have kids who have different birth fathers.” So, there could be as many as five or more children in today’s household, each carrying a different surname connected with their numerous baby daddies. I suspect that this is now considered normal; oops, I mean traditional.

Well, those are some of my thoughts about normalcy.

Dare I publish this? People might consider me unreasonable, narrow-minded, or biased; whatever adjective suits their fancy doesn’t faze me. But in judging me, I hope that they will acknowledge that I am sincere in expressing my beliefs and opinions. I refuse to cowardly straddle the line and pretend to be impartial when I have concrete feelings about something.

I’m sure that even my critics would agree that Charles Addams was on point when he wrote, “Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.” With that – I do agree.

 

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The World is Watching

by on ·Social Media

It never fails. As soon as I get comfortable with something, the rules change. In this case, it would be more accurate to say that my perspective – not the rules – changed.

Back in the day, I clearly remember when I said I wanted no part of social media (SM). And then, after thinking about it for, oh, about two years (no joke), I relented and opened a Facebook account and later one on Twitter.

I became an active participant and proponent of Facebook. I began refuting the negative comments from non-user relatives and friends who said things like, “People put all of their personal business online. I want no part of that.”

My response was often, “It is up to you how much information you chose to share. Smart people don’t reveal any more on FB than they would disclose to a friend, relative, or neighbor, in person or on the phone. You have to know your boundaries. ”

Then, the nay-sayers would come back with, “It’s dangerous. You meet all kinds of shady people online.”  Umm. So, don’t you meet creepy crawlers elsewhere, even in church?

SM has its drawbacks, but I know that some people would agree that it has brought people closer. It has even facilitated the search for estranged persons seeking to locate a long-lost friend or relative. And, wherein before, some of us only occasionally saw each other – usually at some sad event like a funeral, now, we share photos and videos of birthday parties, weddings, and cook-outs. We even get to see children and grandchildren growing up. And since COVID and its variants cause many of us to have second thoughts about mingling with large numbers of people, our social media pages are a welcome respite and safer alternative to group participation. SM is also an excellent venue for promoting our entrepreneur businesses and other endeavors. That’s my usual spiel, or it used to be.

HOWEVER, after recently watching the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma,” my endorsement of social media has come to an abrupt pause. It was as if a bright yellow, black-lettered YIELD sign dropped in front of me. My first thought was to close all of my online accounts, but then I regrouped. (I admit sometimes I tend to be impulsive.)

But WOW! The documentary narrated by several tech experts, former employees of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, is a definite eyeopener. If I had any idea that the ex-social media employees who produced the program were a bunch of disgruntled former workers, I soon put that thought to bed. So instead, I give kudos to those socially conscious whizzes who left their jobs in the tech world because they could not in good conscience continue to support what they saw as the manipulation and control of the masses by some rich folks with $$$ signs in the crosshair.

As one techie expressed in the film, social media is a drug and the account holders are addicted.

It is downright scary to hear the narrators explain the effect SM has on us all, especially young adults and children. Using a teenaged boy as a prototype, the film shows that some of us are so addicted that we don’t know what to do with ourselves when we are denied access to our SM accounts.

Meanwhile, we are given a disturbing look at some folks who are convinced that everything they read online is true because they found it on the Internet. Fake news and unregulated messages circulate on SM like California wildfires, and brainwashing the gullible with propaganda and gossip is big business.

This film reminds unsuspecting patrons that advertisers, promoters of conspiracy theories, divisiveness, and political discord are prevalent on SM platforms. SM managers are using access and power to their advantage. Not only will this documentary make some viewers angry, but it will also blow your mind.

As Kofi Annan said, “Knowledge is power. Information is liberating.” If this film doesn’t make you think, then you don’t have a brain.

One techie in the film said he does not allow his children to use social media at all. Another asked the profound question – “Are we being outsmarted by artificial intelligence?”

The film will not convince die-hard fans to abandon their social media sites. I might close Twitter. I seldom use it anyway, but I don’t see myself giving up FB, at least not in the immediate future. However, I will be even more cautious about what I share and what things like quizzes, polls, surveys, etc., I participate in.

Some viewers may not be affected by what they learn, while others will think what I thought after watching it – be afraid. Be very afraid.

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