Jane Fishman: Confusion ensues when weather and holidays collide

What day is it? What season? Hurricane season is over, right? But why are we sitting outside to eat our New Year’s Day repast and drink the last of our eggnog? All the more confusing since rereading Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” first published in 1928, in which the main character changes gender, generation and garb all under the guise of crafting a “biography” of Vita Sackville-West, her love interest, novelist, poet, socialite and masterful gardener. I tried going modern and listening to the book, but there were too many passages I wanted to underline or mark up (no misspellings though; they produced very clean manuscripts, those Victorians).

Listening might work better if I were behind the wheel of a car on a long-distance road trip with no interruptions though that comes with its own perils. On one trip to Pittsburgh, I was so engrossed in listening to a book, I turned east instead of west on Interstate 26. What a shock to find myself in marsh country facing a sign pointing toward Charleston, South Carolina. That is not something you want to do with an 11-hour road trip.

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Clearly, I haven’t yet mastered the task of maximizing my time (or multitasking) by opting to listen to a book. If they’re not driving, what do people do while they listen? Fold laundry? I don’t have that much to fold. Iron cloth napkins? Iron? Really? Maybe one day. Sit on the couch and stare at the clouds? Too many chances to drift off and fall asleep. Listen while on the exercise bike? Twenty-five minutes doesn’t cover many pages.

The whole conundrum says something about the way I read, too. My deepest apologies to the author, but I tend to skip passages if the description is too laden with details (a shame, I know). Easy to do with a book in your hands, flip, flip, flip, while getting right back to the plot or a shorter paragraph. Not so easy with an audible.

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Walking and listening can work, but walking is about noticing, observing, being in the moment, stopping to do downward facing dog of catching, stopping to find the owl behind that screech.

Some of my best reading time has come during those interminable and odious periods on the phone listening to the repetitive, insincere and disingenuous announcement we all know so well — “Your call is very important to us” — except it’s not. Otherwise they would hire more operators, more front desk people, more nurses at the ready to take my very important call. Anyway, who can read and refrain from talking back. “Really? Very important? Then why am I sitting here for 30 minutes and more waiting to talk to someone?”

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“I about died to death,” a friend said about waiting to talk to someone, using a favorite expression of Sandy West of Ossabaw Island fame.

“Didn’t you just fall with your fanny in the butter,” my cousin Karla said when I told her I reached a human being on the first try. She and her husband Melvin might be the only two people to use that expression. I can’t find any reference to it, but I like it.

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Sometimes I think we may be getting a little too far over our skis with computer software no matter how “important” the recording purports to be. Can we get back to employing a human being to problem solve? There has to be a middle ground. The other day when I was trying to make an appointment for something or other, meeting obstacle after obstacle, I said to the scheduler, “Have you ever heard the expression ‘too many cooks spoil the broth?’” Being under 12 (I’m just guessing here), she said she had not. Then there was a pause, after which she said, “But I like it.”

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And I liked her. A human exchange. In a week or so as Christmas trees come down, menorahs are put away and we begin to slide back into some kind of groove, we might remember the year (2022, right?), but right now I’ll ask again: What day is it?

Jane Fishman is a contributing lifestyles columnist for the Savannah Morning News. Contact her at gofish5@earthlink.net or call 912-484-3045. See more columns by Jane at SavannahNow.com/lifestyle/.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Jane Fishman's new year as we leave behind Christmas trees, menorah