Selfies are New, Right?

    Taking a ‘selfie’ is so popular now that it is hardly interesting any more, and those seeking novelty are reduced to finding really weird things to include in the picture or positions to get themselves into. Even our president has gotten in on the act. And I understand that it has reached almost epidemic proportions in teens and pre-teens.

    Personally, I thought I would never on this green earth take a selfie. But then my favorite dog got in my lap one day (Well, half of her got in my lap. She’s a big dog) and I found myself seeing how this selfie thing worked. It’s only a matter of time before every single person who owns a phone capable of taking pictures will succumb to the desire to see how it works.

I suppose most selfies will be shared by email and the likes of FaceBook, if they’re shared at all. There will be few that will be printed out on paper and even fewer worthy of being printed.

We get to thinking that we’ve invented something new. Selfies are new, aren’t they?

    No, they’re really not. Before the advent of the cell phone and digital photography, people were snapping pictures of themselves. It wasn’t as easy though. They had to set up the camera somehow and set a timer and run around in front of the lens and hope the camera caught them when they looked their best.

    Before cameras, there weren’t any selfies. Right?

    Wrong again.

Artists in bygone times were often hard up to find subjects who would sit still long enough for a portrait. So they propped up a mirror and painted their own images. Slo-mo selfies. Some artists were so good and so famous that we can see their efforts in art museums and in books of art. Before the end of the 15^th century, self portraits were rare, but beginning in about 1490 artists of the caliber of Raphael, Giorgione and Durer used themselves as models. Michelangelo made his first selfie as a cartoon protesting the working conditions in the Sistine Chapel. One of every five of Rembrandt’s paintings is a self-portrait.

    Titian was the first to dare to paint himself as the old man he was. And young people today taking selfies of themselves making ugly faces or doing gross things are hard-pressed to equal Franz Xaver Messerschmidt who created a series of 69 busts of himself showing grimaces including one of him vomiting. Sold to a collector after his death, many of the busts were used in a ‘freak show.’ Messerschmidt is given credit to being a pre-curser of Expressionism.

    Everyone who has taken Art Appreciation has seen van Gogh’s selfies. He painted more than 30 or them.

    So selfies aren’t new, and we can only wonder what will come next in ‘self-expression.’

Source: Book review in the June 30 issue of the Weekly Standard by Henrik Bering of The Self Portrait: a Cultural History by James Hall.

Rubela Is Not Extinct

    Do you recall your history of the settling of America? Remember how you learned that one of the worst things the white man brought to these shores was smallpox and measles? Indian villages were decimated when either disease struck. And measles was just about as bad as smallpox in its effect on native populations.

     Measles was never a disease to discount, even for Europeans who had been exposed to it most of their lives. And it wasn’t any fun for a kid in 1943 either. Because of the warning that it could harm a child’s eyes, the sick room was kept dark, making reading or playing nearly impossible. 

     Measles caused permanent deafness in countless people, and the complications from other diseases made it a very real threat to survival.

     I remember when the measles vaccine was announced. It was almost too good to be true. Each of my four children were vaccinated, and it was a relief to know that they would never get the disease.

    Fast forward to 2014. For several years there have periodically been scary articles published that the measles vaccine causes harm to some children. The  result is that thousands of parents decided to opt out of the vaccination program. So now we have thousands of people who are completely unprotected.

    Measles is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by a virus named rubella. The symptoms are fever, runny nose, cough and a rash all over the body. Very often a sick child will also get an ear infection or pneumonia, and then they are very sick.

    If measles had been stamped out all over the world, similar to what has happened to polio, there would be no problem. But the rubella virus is alive and well in many of the underdeveloped nations of the world.

    From January 1 to April 20 more than 26,000 suspected and 6,000 confirmed cases of measles have been reported in the Philippines. As of May 23, 22 U.S. travelers, mostly unvaccinated, who returned from the Philippines have become sick with measles.

Since measles is a virus, antibiotics won’t cure the disease, and the ailment has been rare enough in the past 25 years that doctors often don’t recognize it.

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends that travelers to the Philippines protect themselves by making sure they are vaccinated against measles, particularly infants 6 - 11 months of age (1 dose of measles vaccine) and children 12 months or older (2 doses of measles vaccine). Likewise, adults should be vaccinated before any foreign travel.

    Isn’t it interesting how people get complacent? No one they know has gotten sick with measles, so it must be safe to leave their children (and often themselves) unprotected. In this case ignorance is definitely NOT bliss.

Who's To Say?

My mother was 16 in 1932 when the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. She had one dress, and since she was the tallest female in the family, there were no hand-me-downs. It was a painful time to be a teenager, and the privations she suffered molded her attitude toward possessions. They were purchased after much deliberation, not taken lightly and not thrown away until there was absolutely no “good” left in them.
Like most of the people who were young during WWII, I remember ration cards, underpants without elastic (they kept falling down), the thrill of  going to the grocery store that had just got in a shipment of bananas, black-outs (even though we were a tiny town in the middle of the country), and the uncertainty that comes from not knowing if our country would win or not. There was a “waste-not, want-not” attitude that clings to this day.
The “Boomers,” the “X Generation,” and the “Millennials” all have characteristics shaped by the political condition of the country, but over the past 50 years there has emerged the attitude that nothing should be saved if it doesn’t have a current use. If something has hung in your closet for a year without being worn, get rid of it. That jar that the pickles came in is just garbage, not something you might use to store left-overs. Old tires are an expensive nuisance to get rid of. When you get tired of a piece of furniture, you just pitch it out and buy new. And if saving stuff is silly, hoarding is a sin or a disease.
The quandary for humans today is deciding what is treasure and what is trash. For many it’s simply saying, “Am I going to use this in the next 3 months?” If the answer is “no,” out it goes. Not for them the crowded closets, overflowing junk drawers, or crammed book cases.
For the rest of us, the decision making is not so easy. Who wouldn’t like to have the very first Batman comic book that you bought for a dime in 1940? The first Barbie doll even in played-with condition is worth a mint to doll collectors. The original  Pez Dispenser that you played with and then pitched would buy you a fancy meal today. The Cracker-Jack tiny metal racer was so insignificant that you didn’t even think about throwing it away. Carnival glass dishes were freebies in boxes of soap. And so on and on.
The trouble is that we can’t tell what is going to have value in the future. That’s bothersome to most of us, but to some it is frightening. And because they cannot know what will have value in the future, they save it all. They become buried in their accumulations and ridiculed for being foolish…or sick.
Perhaps it would be better if we stepped back in our judgementalism and considered these souls as “rescuers.” Rescuers of the trivial and mundane so that in the future these things will not be forgotten.
Most of what they save is probably trash, but mixed into the heaps of stuff will be treasures, things that the contemporary Discarders may even pay good money for at an estate auction and proudly display in their tidy homes.

Published in the Woodford County News Bulletin, 21 May 2014

Walking Home

When I was a freshman at Woodruff High School, we lived on North Jefferson and I walked the 10 or so blocks to and from school. On the way home, I often encountered three grade school aged kids, a boy and two girls returning home from Greely Grade School which right across the street from our apartment house. The smallest girl was always walking up in the grass.

I was shy at the time (I’ve gotten over that, thank goodness), and didn’t really know how to handle saying ‘hi’ every time we met, so often I would cross the street and walk down the other side so I didn’t have to say hello. Seems silly now, but that’s how it was. During my sophomore year we moved  to Dechman Street so I no longer met them when I was walking home.

Occasionally I’d see a dark-haired, older boy going into the house where the three kids lived, but I merely noted the fact and didn’t think any more about it.

Fast-forward a year.

Ronnie Marshall was going to run for school president and he noticed that I was always drawing, so he thought I might be an addition to his campaign committee. The time of the first meeting arrived (February 1954), and Buddy Curtis was to pick me up and take me to another committee member’s house; I think she lived on North Madison across from the Episcopal Church. Someday I’m going to remember to drive down that street and see if my memory is right or if it’s all haywire.

On the way, Buddy was to pick up some boy who was playing in the Woodruff High Jazz Band. There was another boy in the pick-up truck, but I can’t remember who he was. He and Buddy kept talking about how this guy they were to pick up was so funny!

We waited just awhile and out came a guy from the school, and we four (in the front seat of a pick-up) headed the few blocks to the meeting place. All evening I noticed the “funny” boy, and he was indeed funny. Kept everyone in stitches.

I looked for him at school the next week, but didn’t see him. The next meeting of the committee came, and we managed to be sitting next to each other all evening and in the back of the pick-up on the way to my house.

Fast forward again.

The funny fellow turned out to be Jim Fyke. We’ve been married 54 years now, and he still keeps me in stitches.

The three kids I met on Madison Street were his brother and sisters, Gary, Mary Ellen and Barbara. The boy entering the house was probably him.

Soon I was a frequent visitor at 1209 NE Madison. We dated for 5 years before we could afford to get married.

Fast forward yet again.

At the gathering of the five Fyke siblings in June 2013, Barbara (the youngest, the one who walked in the grass) said that the three of them often talked about the pretty girl they met on the street. She and Mary Ellen noticed that the girl had a leather purse! And a camelhair coat! And they wondered if she were nice or snooty. I had no idea they even noticed me, let alone remembered so many details.

You know, I can never tell teen agers that their high school loves are just passing infatuations, because Jim and I fell in love when we were just 17 and 15, and I can’t imagine having lived the last 59 years (54 married, 5 dating) without him.