Keeping Up

My local CVS doesn't carry wristwatches anymore. You can't find analog televisions on the shelves. It's even hard to scope out a tape for a VCR player. Keeping up with changes requires a keen mind. Just when I learn the lingo, that technology is on its way out. Everything is replaced by a newer, brighter, more streamlined version.

Some things don't change. They trudge along— often seen as inevitable and out of sightlines, save on occasions. Yet, some folks wear these afflictions on their hearts. They speak of the homeless, of children with distended stomachs, of divisions of land, of people, of faiths, of the earth's needs, of children who will not grow up, of children who die before they reach a respectable age for dying, of crops that burn up in a soil hard to till, of water too polluted to drink, of blindness, of metaphysical blindness.

In today’s newspaper: blu-ray disks may not be the cause célèbre because soon we will all be streaming video. I've never held a blu-ray disk, yet it may be living on borrowed time. Perhaps I should seek out a disk so that I experience its feel before forced obsolescence?

I've never touched a dolphin, or felt the texture of sand in the Gobi Desert, or ran my hand across the stones on the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

I loved my old wristwatch. It didn't do anything except tell time. It never glowed in the dark or acted as an alarm, timer, and lap counter. It liked a dry environment. It didn't stop working. I lost my watch.