Dead batteries are quite the wake-up call

I know. Over the past months and - yes, years - I’ve poked fun at how the encroachment of modern electronic devices has, little by little, affected my daily life, and although some can be helpful, some somewhat entertaining, when you’re blissfully asleep and a beep-beep-chirp-chirp jostles you awake … well, I just don’t know.

As if reenacting a scene from a bad slapstick comedy, I found myself stumbling around, tripping over stuff, bleary-eyed, cussin’ and fussin’ and, after finding nothing ablaze (thankfully), trying to figure out which electronic device that beeping was coming from.

Turns out the carbon monoxide detector wanted its battery changed. At 2 a.m. and RIGHT NOW.

It’s not the wake-up call you want in the dead of night, but in this electronically controlled world, I’m not surprised by much anything.

Let’s see … back in the old days, there was no worry about carbon monoxide poisoning, at least before cars and gas stoves and such.

End of whining.

Speaking of back in the day, I ran across this in the Chieftain archives. On this day, Nov. 14 in 1908, the newspaper reported that Socorro County overwhelmingly went Republican in the presidential election the week prior. “As nearly as can now be determined,” the editor writes, “William Howard Taft will receive 321 of the 484 votes of the electoral college for president against William Jennings Bryan’s 163, almost two to one.”

A sidebar to the election coverage notes that Don Matias Contreras of the Los Ranchos de La Joya precinct was brought before Judge Amos Green on a charge of “interfering with the voters at the polls on election day.” Interestingly, the nephew of Don Matias, County Commissioner Pedro S. Contreras, blew the whistle on him and was the main witness.

Anyway, to cleanse my brain of the recent neurodiversity across the political spectrum, I spent the better part of the last few days re-binge-watching old episodes of Longmire, the show on Netflix filmed up in San Miguel County but is supposed to represent Wyoming. And stars an Australian actor. Go figure.

I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s a cop show about this present-day county sheriff who is a throwback to more straightforward ways of, to use Andy Taylor’s phraseology, “sheriffin’.” One of the recurring themes in the show is Sheriff Longmire’s refusal to own a cell phone, and on that aspect, I can relate. It’s not that I don’t use mine every day; it’s just that I’m not sure it’s something that is improving my life. Sure, it’s nice to be able to call or text someone on a whim if I’m walking around, but since most of my day I’m sitting right next to an actual telephone, it becomes more of a novelty. Another in a long line of gadgets that we’ve all learned to embrace (along with a carbon monoxide detector) as a marvel of technology that we can’t live without, although I begrudgingly concede that my air fryer is the bomb when it comes to reheating crispy fried chicken.

Having said that, I still hold that the more sophisticated things have become, the less fun we’re having. I’m thinking here of lyrics of a song by Cat Stevens that popped up on my randomized Spotify playlist called “(Remember) the Days of the Old Schoolyard.”

Remember the days of the old schoolyard,

When we had imaginings and we had

All kinds of things, and we laughed

As I recall, it was during a time when, if we went outside to play, we got dirty.

Kids played Simon Says, Mother May I, red light-green light, hide-and-go-seek, jacks, marbles, mumblety-peg with a real jackknife, tag-you’re-it, touch football and raced bicycles against each other in the street.

Saturday mornings were reserved for cartoons on TV. I walked to the corner store alone, and we rode our bikes for hours without a cell phone. The street lights were your curfew.

I don’t know if all that sounds idyllic or banal to young folks, but that sums it up.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner once contemplated. “All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

Don’t get me wrong, I have no beef with the current times, it’s just that I cringe a little when a young person says that Pink Floyd is just grandma and grandpa’s music.

Oh, one more item that caught my eye from that 1908 Chieftain newspaper.

“Attorney Elfego Baca was run down by a fire wagon in Albuquerque and had two ribs broken,” The paper says, “His many Socorro County friends will be glad to know that he is fast recovering from the injury.”

I, too, am glad.