Illustration from my work-in-progress. © 2011 Sean W. Byrne.
I am trapped in an era in which I’ve never lived.
It is the era in which my grandparents lived. A time when everyone wore hats. When automobiles and telephones came only in black. When letters were written with fountain pens and sealed with wax, and penmanship was important because (like a hat), it said something about its owner. In this time, letters weren’t written in haste, but composed with care.
Last Tuesday, at work: I am responding to an email. The phone rings. I stop typing and answer it. After I hang up, I manage to type two more words before a coworker sticks his head in my office and asks me a question. Ten minutes later, I return to my email. I type another two words when my cell phone beeps. I have a text message. While answering it, I receive a voice call on the very same phone. Much, much (much!) later, after many more interruptions, I finally finish the email. I notice there are over a dozen Autosave versions of it in my Drafts folder.
My grandfather worked for a company that made maps. His workspace consisted of a large room, and in the middle of the room was a shallow, rectangular reservoir filled with a developing solution. The whole place smelled of chemicals. Around the perimeter of the room were offices. My grandfather sat in one of these offices, at a big wooden desk with a wooden swivel chair. There was a high demand for road maps back then. The Interstates were new and road travel was big. The company updated their maps every couple of years. “It’s a neverending job,” my grandfather used to say.
Last spring: I am driving to a birthday celebration for a friend. We are meeting for dinner at a restaurant in a recently developed area of town. I am using my GPS. It indicates that the restaurant is straight ahead, in a strip mall on the right. I stop at the coordinates indicated. There is no restaurant there, only a newly constructed bank. I keep driving, past more strip malls, a parking lot, another bank. The GPS recalculates and gives it another shot, sending me back in the direction from which I came. Again, I arrive at the coordinates, and again…no restaurant. All the new buildings and roads have sprung up overnight like mushrooms, and nobody has bothered to tell the satellites.
My grandfather was an artist. He used to sit in his favorite easy chair with a drawing board on his lap and sketch. I would climb into his lap and ask him to draw me things: a dolphin, a monkey, a monster with a human brain. He was mysterious and exciting. He had tattoos on his arms (“Never get one,” he told me more than once, “you’ll regret it.”). One of his legs was artificial, from a motorcycle accident in his youth. I always sat on the other leg—the soft one. He had performed in vaudeville as a child and later, as a young man, earned a living as a nightclub singer. That was when he met my grandmother. They eloped to New York City in 1939. Jimmy Stewart’s New York. Katharine Hepburn’s New York. The New York of another time, when everything was magic.
I am trapped in an era in which I’ve never lived.
But “trapped” isn’t really the right word. “Trapped” implies I want to leave. And when I am done writing or drawing for the day (or more often, for the night), and it’s time to come back through the wardrobe to this world, I feel a tug in my chest akin to homesickness. I don’t want to leave the world on the other side of the keyboard, on the other side of the drawing board.
I am trapped, actually, in the era in which I live.
