Until you taste their bread, you don’t really know them

"I trust everything is good in your part of the world."

The recipient of the email in which wrote that sentence lives far away, diagonally across the country from me.  Jim moved there a few years ago.  Every once in a while, we trade emails in which we share awful groaners.  Like this one that he had sent me a while ago:

Jim is much older than I am.  So, naturally, I was/am concerned about him in the time of the coronavirus.

In his reply, Jim writes that he is healthy, and adds, "I haven’t had much in the way of puns for awhile so have not sent you any."

There are a couple of posts in which I have referred to this old friend, who was a good neighbor for a few years.

The following is an edited version of a post from August 2012.
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It seems like during crises in the recent past, the younger generations texted, or posted on Facebook, or emailed sympathetic messages, whereas the older generations who lived close by went beyond that and asked if they could help out by bring over food.  The younger generations who lived close by didn't think about the food aspect.

Of course, with the coronavirus, it is a whole new paradigm of the young and the old keeping to ourselves and engaging in virtual interactions.  Damn COVID-19!

My best memory of a neighbor sharing food left me with a deep appreciation of the neighbor and the idea of sharing food.  I was in high school when my grandmother died.  In the traditional brahminical context in which I grew up, no celebrations for a year, which meant that we kids wouldn't get to eat all those wonderful goodies that mother would have otherwise made.

Well, fully aware of this, our neighbor then sent across home-made sweets for every major religious event that entire year.  Not just a couple of pieces, but a tray full of tasty eats every single time.

The neighbor's actions were immensely louder than powerful than the most commonly expressed phrase of "I am sorry to hear about your loss."

Of course, the situation doesn't have to be mournful in order to share food.  We can do it on good days too.

One of my best experiences when I reconnected with old school mates was when they invited me over to have food at their homes.  Equally wonderful was when I got some of them to come over to my parents' home to spend some time together and break that proverbial bread.

These experiences of interacting with, and understanding, friends is not the same as interactions with friends on Facebook.  There is simply no comparison at all, which is what the NY Times' David Carr found out a few months ago when he was invited to a dinner with a bunch of people with whom he had had extensive online interactions.  The host had baked the bread that Carr found to be very tasty, and he writes that the"connection in an online conversation may seem real and intimate, but you never get to taste the bread."

As I have often blogged (like here,) interactions on Facebook seem far from the real and substantive friendships that most of us prefer.

Carr notes:

you can follow someone on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, quote or be quoted by them in a newspaper article, but until you taste their bread, you don’t really know them.

When my neighbor Carol was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, I took food over a couple of times.  Before a road trip, I took Jim and their son a salad that I had made.  Jim asked me whether I wanted to visit with Carol.  I followed him to the bedroom, but she was asleep.

That was my final visit with her. Soon after that, Jim sold the house and moved. 

You cannot virtualize all these from the real world.

And in between I drink ... Black coffee

Most of the time at home, I operate in silence.  Other than the low-decibel traffic-noise or bird-chirping, or the occasional loud gardening sounds, it is mostly a quiet home.  Even most ashrams in India aren't this quiet, I would think.

When I want to have music in the background, I love to play one of the few vinyls that I have purchased over the years from the used-stuff-stores.  Or, the mix-tapes from the old days.  Or the CDs.  And, yes, sometimes I also stream Pandora or YouTube.

There is something magical about lifting the turntable arm, placing the LP, and the sounds then filling the home.  Like the magic of starting with vegetables and grains, and ending with tasty dishes with the aroma filling the home.

These days, it seems like fewer and fewer people prepare meals in their kitchens, and even fewer play music with LPs, CDs, and tapes.  Music is streamed.  Straight into one's ears, while the rest of the home can be a quiet zone.

But, the ability to instantly stream any music from anywhere has also completely devalued music itself.  NPR's Ari Shapiro notes that "It feels to me like as we go from purchasing physical things, like CDs, to purchasing MP3s on iTunes to now just streaming, the connection to the music we listen to has become weaker."

Shapiro's guest Amy Wang agrees with him:

So that's the hypothesis for why live events are growing so much. And people want to go to concerts and festivals more than ever because if you can stream things so easily and so openly every day, then you want to crave that emotional connection to an artist that you can get maybe in person or via some other means rather than just buying their music. 

The connection to the music is weaker.  Music is not merely about the notes.  It is about emotions.  The emotional connect is now weaker.  Which is why the old and the young want to go to live concerts.  The old go to concerts where the even older musicians are far from their best selves, and sometimes are unable to hit the notes.  It does not matter for the audience, who are there for the emotional connect.  They would even sing along and drown out the musician!

What an irony!  My father has stories about his younger days when live concerts were the only way one could listen to musicians.  And then the radio came to his village.  A few rich people who had radios played them loud enough for the poorer neighbors also to listen.  The record-player and then the big-fat spool-tape players made listening at any time possible.  Over the next couple of decades, we rapidly moved to compact cassette tapes and CDs.  All through these, the listener could still emotionally connect with the musician.

Streaming killed the emotional connect.  We humans die for the emotional connect.  And we now can't wait for the live concerts.  I am sure my father wonders about such craziness that he has been witness to.

Whether it is music, or food, or sex, or talking, or whatever, ultimately there is nothing that can substitute for the real, live, experience.  The sooner we realize this, the healthier we will be.

Maybe I will break the silence by playing the Sarah Vaughan LP.  Meanwhile, you can listen to her Black Coffee.

You can have this virtual cake ... but, eat you cannot!

After the meeting, I was hanging out at the airport killing time by walking around and observing life.  I spotted two colleagues waiting for their flights.  I walked over and chatted with them.

One talked about how she enjoys having a second home in Brooklyn, even as she continues to work and live for the most part in a town four hours away.

"The two mortgages are tight ... sometimes I feel like I can't ever go on a real vacation.  But, then I reach Brooklyn, and my friends are right across from me, and I am happy," she said.

"Yes, ultimately it is all about the human-human interactions, right?  It is not really about the vacation travels."

People increasingly seem to be forgetting the importance of the human interaction in real time and space.  They fail to understand that virtual is not the same. It is like my favorite example that you can't eat a virtual cake.  It is only real water that quenches the thirst, not the virtual.

David Brooks writes in his column that "Online is a place for human contact but not intimacy."  But, people seem to be mistaking one for another, and fail to understand the difference between contact and intimacy, between acquaintance and friend.

There is no turning back.  The virtual will increasingly be the preferred choice, even as people know within that it is the real that they truly seek. 

And then one day in the future, humanity will run into the very scenario that E.M. Forster wrote about years before all these developed:

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind."
She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

Cry is all we can do!