The Old & the New
& Staying Flexible

It seems advances in technology and its applications in day-to-day life are being reworked and upgraded with increasing speed and without warning. This becomes acutely evident when I traveled outside of New England – a fairly rare occurrence.

Learning to use a computer, a cell phone – piece of cake. Now it seems you need an app for nearly everything; getting boarding passes for the airline, getting a ride from point A to point B, or paying for a parking spot.

Tasks I assume simple and straightforward now require a smart phone and either cell a signal or high-speed internet service. A radio in a rental car shouldn’t be too hard to navigate, but the “old world” operator inputs are so different, it is hard to know where to even start.

Some of this could be explained by the transition to the internet-based economy that started close to twenty years ago and has really taken off in the last ten years.

Most people (especially those under fifty) are able to meet a majority of their social and material needs through Amazon, Spotify, Facebook and Twitter – nearly instant gratification with just a few clicks. I was recently at a small local store that lost its internet access and pretty much put a stop to all transactions.

Navigating between the old pre-internet world and the current internet world is challenging. A handful a years ago, there was a big fight between John Deere and John Deere farmers that wanted to repair their own tractors, but needed proprietary software to even get started.

Just recently, Apple started offering a suitcase of tools for repairing your own iPhone. A great idea in theory, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

You could rent the tools, but if you don’t return them, they charge your credit card $1500. But the real kicker is even with the specialized tools, most of the repairs are hours long and remain very challenging.

Recently, Canadian N-News subscriber Bob Paterson (see his letter on page 12 and his photos on the back cover) wrote in with a comment. Our ongoing email conversation about tractors, motorcycles, local papers and the dichotomy of “the old” and “the new” spurred Bob to write about a farm supply store that had a parking lot with Tesla charging stations on one side and sheds for horse and buggies on the other. (There is a significant Mennonite community in the area.)

That made me think about the intense flexibility we all need these days to continue to balance the apps and the horse and buggies.

Social Distancing Versus Distant Socializing

It was a very strange start to 2020. On the second day of the new year, my Uncle Gerard, the man that started this magazine and who showed me my first camera and helped create a passion in me for art and photography, passed away.

Shortly after that, the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in China. A few weeks passed and it was here. Suddenly, our lives are all about handwashing and social distancing to try and slow the spread of the disease.

At first blush, this wasn’t a big challenge for me. I have a home office that is full of computers, books, manuals, and all of the things that are sold through the magazine. Though I used to have people helping me here (first Sarah, then Jill, Becky, finally Rowan), that is no longer the case. A few years ago, when Rowan needed to move on to a full-time job, I didn’t replace her.

Taking over fulfillment of orders and updating the database leaves me very little free time, especially when I am putting an issue together. I spend every weekday, pretty much by myself, with an occasional neighbor stopping by for eggs or to borrow a tool. I go to the post office once a day, sometimes twice. Beyond that, I am home.

Given all this, I have been experiencing the opposite of social distancing. My wife (who is a social worker at our local VA hospital) starting working from home in April. My older daughter’s college stopped having in-person classes as did my younger daughter’s high school. What was once a quiet workspace during the week has become a small office with everyone doing their own thing and fighting for bandwidth.

This got me thinking about how tractors naturally work to socially distance us. Generally speaking, when you are out mowing the field, plowing the garden or moving snow, you are alone on the tractor. (And for me, it is a meditative state at times.) Even when working on repairing or maintaining a tractor, there aren’t a bunch of people around, you are probably working alone.

At the same time, the N-News Magazine has, for the past 35 years, offered a type of distant socializing where subscribers get to look into someone else’s shop or hear about someone else’s memories from the printed page. It has acted as a form of cohesion in a world that seems to be tearing itself apart.

So, for the little bit of time that you sit reading this issue, think about all the ways this hobby and our collective memories have helped hold us all together.