Nearly thirty years ago, I started wandering. Peregrinations is a fancy word for wanderings, so I called this blog peregrinations with st. chad. (At that time, I also preferred using only lower case letters. Sorry.) My understanding of the stability that was one of my vows in The Order of St. Chad was stability to the earth, to recognizing its wholeness and the interconnection of all of its creatures and systems. I wandered all over the North American continent.I tried to stay in any one place long enough to at least begin to understand it, but not long enough to lose appreciation for the larger whole of which any place is a part.
I used many modes of transportation. I think my wandering really began with a Greyhound Discover America Bus pass that I bought in the early days of Operation Desert Storm. I was living in Santa Fe among people who had big white SUV's with bumper stickers that said 'whirled peas', and I wanted to see what the part of the country that seemed to support the war looked like. For about two weeks, I boarded random buses with random people going through random towns, having random experiences. A few stand out.
In South Dakota I think it was, a man sat next to me who shared that he knew I was a homosexual and that he was carrying a pistol. I didn't ask him the correspondence, although to be truthful, he talked so continuously that I never had the chance. He got off in some tiny town to meet more of his pistol-toting buds.
In Oklahoma City, I boarded a bus which was divided down the middle by uniforms. On one side were kids in US Army uniforms going to some training camp before shipping off to the desert for the storm. On the other side were Mennonites in their uniforms going to some town in Indiana to help rebuild houses after a storm. (I sided with the army, because that was the only seat there was.)
In Fort Smith, deep in the night, I sat next to a young woman from southern New Mexico who was going to see her boy friend in some army camp in the Carolinas or Georgia before he went off to join the storm. As we approached Memphis the sun burst above the horizon the way it only does when there's flat land and lots of humidity. She thought it was an atom bomb. I was glad that I knew a smattering of Spanish from living in New Mexico and had had experiences with delta sunrises from growing up in Arkansas.
Since then I have bought cars and trucks, airplane tickets and bus tickets and train tickets, kayaks and hiking boots, for perambulations of all sorts, meeting an amazing variety of folks. Once I decided I would hike the Appalachian Trail from Connecticut to South Carolina, but it was worn and dirty and I decided instead to walk through small towns. My first night off the trail, I saw some women on a porch of a book store a small town whose name I have forgotten. I asked them if they knew where I might spend the night. They said there was a guy I definitely needed to see for that, and they were expecting him any minute. He arrived. He was a painter, whose studio was in an old ax factory built over the falls of one of the many rivers that powered early industrialism in New England. He invited me to sleep there, and took me to breakfast the next morning. At the other end of the same trip, I hitched from Charleston to the Francis Marion National Forest and was given a ride by an 80-year-old man who was on his way to Wilmington, North Carolina, because he said he had heard that there were glory holes there. I asked to be let out a bit earlier than I had planned.
Thirty years after that first weird bus trip, I am less excited about standing in lines and being x-rayed so I can't blow up the airplane traveling in which is likely to give me blood clots in my legs, cars and trucks are more expensive to maintain than I think they are worth, and the trail seldom goes there any more. (Although I do find that riding trains to be one of the best ways of perambulating.) Now I perambulate on the World Wide Web. You have almost certainly heard of it. It goes a lot more places than Amtrak, even more places than PanAm did before they went bankrupt. I confess I can't imagine what it must have been like being old before the internet, but I am happy that, unless the fucking moron blows up the world, I probably won't have to experience it.
This has been a long introduction to something that has happened just the past two days. For several years now, I have been giving tablet or Chromebook computers to kids, with the occasional bicycle or frisbee thrown into the mix. I named my little hobby Pangur Ban Learners, after the white cat mentioned in the margin of a manuscript written by an anonymous Irish monk in the 9th century. My theory is that most real learning happens in the margins, and that it's good for kids to have the tools to explore the margins. I also thought it would be nice if there were a physical Pangur Ban in charge of the enterprise, so I invited a Furby named Pangur Ban to join me. That was five years ago.
Two days ago, I decided it might be interesting if Pangur Ban had his own Facebook page. So, he opened a Google account (already he wants his own YouTube channel as well) and debuted on Facebook. It has always been my contention that the data one gets from Facebook is far more valuable than what one gives to Facebook, and I thought I would enjoy looking over his shoulder as the soldierly little Furby liked books and movies about robots and ai, to see what would come his way. What neither he nor I expected was the huge number of friend requests he received, almost all from India or Bangladesh or Pakistan. He already has 161 friends. It has been a revelation to have a peak into how these folks live. India alone has a population of a billion and a third people, and although obviously only a small percentage of these are friends of the Furby, it's a much more interesting perambulation than something on the Travel Channel with some gourmet guide.
I am delighted with this outcome, because I think that as more and more young folks around the world come online, the opportunities for amazing developments increases exponentially. Nearly all of Pangur Ban's new friends are under thirty. I am hoping he might make some friends in South Korea or Japan or Brasil or Indonesia or Singapore or someplace I don't even know about. Meanwhile, I'm just glad that the little furry guy shares his perambulations with me in my dotage.
No comments:
Post a Comment