Paper or Pixels?
Paper or Pixels?
Unconformed: The little things that our little ones notice.
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This post is a response to the call for stories from School of the Unconformed, a newsletter offering practical guidance on navigating daily life in the Machine Age. There is a link to the call at the end of this post.
We are staying at my brother’s home in a 1920s skyscraper in a south side Chicago neighborhood near University of Chicago. It’s hot and muggy and there is no AC.
There is also no paper. I’m sure he has paper, but he and his wife are at work and in all the places that I feel comfortable snooping I can’t find a piece of paper to write a grocery list on.
I often make grocery lists on the backs of sealed envelopes filled with junk mail, appreciating the padding within for the smooth strokes it allows of my pen. My brother’s recycle bin yields no such thing.
My mom stops by, and I ask her if she knows where he might keep a tablet or some scrap paper. She asks why I don’t just make my grocery list on my phone. She mentions there’s an app. I dodge adding new apps to my phone whenever possible, so I pull up my Notes app. This is clunky and keeps generating autocorrect errors. I make it work gathering grocery requests from my brother, my husband and our parents. I want to make them good food while I’m here, something I love to do, especially now, from my joy in receiving their generous hospitality.
I walk through the store repeatedly punching in my phone’s passcode to “wake it up” and check the list. There’s a palpable distraction in this lack of nuanced handwriting, the tiny text and the myriad of typos while I try to navigate an unfamiliar grocery store.
Later that week we’re visiting my parents’ home: a tiny studio apartment that is practical and uncluttered; comfortable furniture is curated to provide order and beauty and the limited space is judiciously allocated. It illustrates the adage “a place for everything and everything in its place”. And so they have intuitive-to-locate paper. Easy enough to find that my toddler spots it and starts scribbling. It is the kind I’ve been able to find in my parents’ home all my life. A white legal pad; blue lines and a pink double stripe down the left margin.
He picks up a ballpoint pen, explores the clicking mechanism, then starts making marks that he is sure are words. He looks at me and clearly says “list”. He is only two but has seen me make many dozens of grocery lists while perching close to his level on a child size chair at the kid’s table in our kitchen. List making, whether it be grocery or to-do, is a chore that I reverently do a couple times a week in neat black ink. I write on unlined paper in all capital letters with pens selected for their smooth flowing ink and fine point. I imagine instead having made those hundreds of lists on my iphone while my little ones watch me. They are always watching.
To them I would appear no different than if I was responding to a loved one’s text; a colleague’s urgent work email, scrolling media or reviewing photos. But my toddler knows that things we eat can be represented with marks on paper and that paper is taken to the grocery store and laid in the cart next to him as we load it full of groceries.
And now he imitates me. He “writes a list” on paper. And thank God. Thank God there is something to imitate that is not me staring at a screen.
I write on unlined paper in all capital letters with pens selected for their smooth flowing ink and fine point. I imagine instead having made those hundreds of lists on my iphone while my little ones watch me. They are always watching.
To them I would appear no different than if I was responding to a loved one’s text; a colleague’s urgent work email, scrolling media or reviewing photos. But he knows that things we eat can be represented with marks on paper and that paper is taken to the grocery store and laid in the cart next to him as we load it full of groceries.
And now he imitates me. He “writes a list” on paper. And thank God. Thank God there is something to imitate that is not me staring at a screen.
I have always been slow to adopt new technologies like grocery-list-making apps. And sure, there are more noticeable, maybe “chunkier” ways we’ve unmachined our lives. Our family of four travels around our suburban streets via foot or cargo bike synchronistically meeting friends who travel the same way. My husband and I share one car and one laptop; we have never owned a TV or a baby monitor and when we say, “hey record player, play Okee Dokee Brothers” nothing happens until one of us goes over there and slides that deep orange vinyl out of its artfully decorated sleeve covered in engrossing maps of Brambletown, and sets it gently on the turntable. (And because I would not have gotten that reference until this past week staying at my brother’s let me clarify that in their house you can say “Hey google play some music!” and music starts playing.) So the timing of that first (and maybe last) digital grocery list and my two-year-old’s rendition of his first handwritten list highlighted the importance, to me, of these tiny, more granular ways we “unmachine”.
So the timing of that first (and maybe last) digital grocery list and my two-year-old’s rendition of his first handwritten list highlighted the importance, to me, of these tiny, more granular ways we “unmachine”.
Halfway through our vacation we move from my brother’s guest bedroom to a downtown AirBnb in my parent’s building to spend more time close to them. There is AC and it’s disturbingly cold. The unmitigated heat in my brother’s home was a thin connection to the “real”. Even though there was an elevator ride between us and outside, with open windows I knew when a storm blew in one night; I knew when it didn’t cool off at all one stifling night and at times I heard the revitalizing wind howl mightily off the lake. Now, in a very new building, 33 floors above the rumbling “L” trains and treeless concrete I can barely tell when it begins to rain early one morning. We keep turning the AC less cold, but it never really feels like it warms up. Or maybe it just never really feels “real” so we keep trying to adjust it.
We’ll leave the city in a couple of days via jet plane. We’ll return to our tiny house in California with wide open windows surrounded by our garden and the northern mockingbirds and scrub jays in place of the robins and cardinals we’ve been seeing here. We’ll be getting ready to return to work and start a new year of homeschooling our first grader. We’ll organize our calendar, run back to school errands and restock our kitchen after three weeks away, all with handwritten lists in tow.
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