​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.

                                             Play It Legato      

 
   Do popular songs affect your moods?  During my own acne days, long before the word zit was coined, I'd  hum "Again.  This couldn't happen again..." and pretend romance pain.  Because of You, ‘my' song with a first love, made me aware I was leaving girlhood.  World War II's, This is the Army, Mr. Jones, always formed a smile on my lips as one of the names in the lyrics was Mr. Green, my father's name;  but I'd tell the wooden radio that my father spelled his with an ‘e' at the end. 
   I played Little Green Apples on the piano, in 1960's, for my three young children.  They also liked the rhythm of Sweet Caroline and the moody Mac Arthur Park.  Now, 2017, do they remember how we giggled after tapping notes on ivory keys and singing as loudly as we could?
   Technological advances have made a few old lyrics or titles ghoulish.  I left my heart in San Francisco:  transplant talk!   My  heart belongs to you:  it literally might!  Heartaches:  coronary by-pass consideration!  Open-heart surgery has already been done on six of my relatives, and I've had a cardiac catherization.  Might these songs make you feel creepy if you had my family background?
   I guess expressing affection by using the word ‘heart’ began to change when my father died at age 45 from a coronary occlusion.  Years later, my mother sustained two massive attacks, and open-heart surgery, so I even get upset hearing the term 'heartwarming' as I medically know her body had to be cooled down considerably before that operation and then warmed up.  Are others affected as I am? 
   "Ah sweet mystery of life tonight I've found you...":  in vitro fertilization.  "Fly me to the moon...":  it has been done. Maybe that's why many current tunes depend upon beat rather than words. 
   The Handicap March, copyright 1895 by G. M. Rosenberg, was supposedly written for motion picture, newsreel, horse-race sequences.  How many people now just reading that song title would think horses rather than Viet Nam veterans parading in Washington, or the Special Olympics for disabled persons? 
   Sermons in song are ageless.  Always Take Mother's Advice, with a copyright of 1884 by Willis Woodward and Company, probably could be played next Mother's Day, 2018, and ‘ring true'.  Doesn't the name sound ‘seasonal'? 
   During my New York City girlhood, schoolteachers wanted pupils to know titles and composers of classical music, so I was taught, singsong:  'Amaryllis written by Ghis,  Ghis sells apples two cents apiece.'  In doing me a service, a disservice occurred;  I heard all my music appreciation melodies with jingles attached!  When seated at a live Philharmonic, and the orchestra conductor raises his baton to begin a familiar strain, I can't shut-out the jingle in my head and concentrate on the composition.
   Sometimes, though, mystique rather than selections impressed.  For example, Tanglewood in the Berkshire Mountains, has formal gardens, mountain backdrop, a lush lawn to lie on beneath an incredibly beautiful sky;  the setting makes the concert an experience. 
   A grandson went to an Infected Mushrooms concert winter 2017.  He asked the Artificial Intelligence cylinder in my house to play some of the Infected Mushrooms songs.  The beat was fine, but the name of the group made me uncomfortable. Rap music with its message of violence, in many cases, does the same thing to me.
   Perhaps I'm reacting to some titles and lyrics because I've lost the innocence of Singing in the Rain?   Now I'm feeling pressured by calendar pages and reminded with a song (by Wizell and Melsher, ©Trinity Music, Inc.) I May Never Pass This Way Again.

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​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.

​                                    Bytes don’t Bite  
 
 
            I'm part of the passive era, the Silent Generation known in television land as 'happy days.' Co-eds, in single-sex dorms, were called 'girls', dress codes were never challenged, and...well, what has any of this to do with computers?   How easy do you think it is to give COMMANDS when conditioning caused a bland, obedient personality!
            No word-processor code has, in its memory, any bits from my compliant childhood;  the latter is etched in my brain's convolution remaining forever like a certain scar on my finger where a dog bit me.  At six years old, I went to pet a puppy, and got a chomp.  My desire was to yell at the animal;  instead I apologized for disturbing the dog.    
            Schoolboys threw ice balls at my bare legs showing below my skirt, and blood dripped down staining my seventh grade white socks, but I was not to take snow and smash it at them.  Girls didn't do that.  Don't make a scene.  Don't be aggressive.  Don't be vulgar.  Don't be too assertive or too competitive.  Don't be bold, outspoken...don't act like a boy.  I was a good athlete but was told not to beat boys during competition:  "pretend you aren't so capable" was a catch-phrase.
            The most brazen act I can remember is associated with my last spanking.  I refused to cry and repeated what I'd read in a magazine:  "the only reason you are hitting me, Mother, is because you've lost your wits and can't think of anything intelligent to say."
            In 1982, I took this pre-conditioned pleasing personality and put it before the first home PC that relied on commands.  I would have felt better saying 'how are you' as a salutation when it showed "hello".  As it prompted "ok", I wanted to say 'thanks'.  Why couldn't the word 'question' have been programmed into the word-processor software instead of 'command'?
            Silicon Valley South, in California, in 1983, offered counseling  for “computer widows and their mates” believing there was a "conflict between the perfect machine and the imperfect human being."  Of course the inference was that females couldn't use or understand electronic items.  Was I, then, acting like a male because my nails tapped plastic computer-powered typing keys, above which sat a necessary word-processor template?  Was that black square-faced computer screen without hair or eyes or ears or lips more perfect than human me?  I knew I could shut off its glare by depressing a red lever!
            My p.c. was not a threat to my family;  it threatened me!  It reminded me of my inadequacies in logic because I'm a feeling illogical being, made no response to irrational statements except to coolly remind me of syntax error, permitted no interaction or friendship to be set up.  It didn't require sleep, or food, or love, or sex.  It was so damn smug with aloof comments instead of criticism, and superior language that insisted I talk to it its way. 
         As my 1982 model with its double 5¼” floppies began to feel more comfortable, and the software seemed less hostile, my mate surprised me with a 1988 hard disk, 3½" floppy machine.  Familiar was replaced with foreign as I needed to understand trees, paths, roots;  but was this a computer or a garden?  What about data neatly arranged on an obsolete word processor in a disk size I'd no longer use!  Download.  Convert to ASCII.  Middle-man it with utility programs.  Text-in/out into a large modern software package that boasted of a master-document I couldn't master and a macro I'd never heard of.  When the Support Line assured me that mastery over master-document would be a masterful accomplishment, I felt happy/miserable, adequate/ inadequate.
            During my '82 computer-infancy to my '88 toddler stage, DOS jumped from 1.0 to 3.3;  I wasn't ready for the leap.
            I had trouble giving orders to soft diskettes and a screen that said "hello", so how would I deal with hardened hardware and a cursor devoid of courtesy?  As a writer and former college instructor of writing, I can use words perfectly but word processors reminded me of a Russian novel where I had to list the cast of characters inside the front cover to refer to as I plowed through foreign text.  
            Ah.  2017.  DOS is as foreign as horses-and-buggies.  Computers can be laptops, have touch-screens, automatic Internet plus e-mail, monitors larger than my old television sets, flash drives, and some have ‘dashboards’/ wigits/  built-in cameras so one may talk and see another person, voice-activated ability, watch television being streamed....  My husband’s wrist watch actually is a computer! I’m typing on a PS2 obsolete touch-typist keyboard, in front of a small monitor, using a WindowsVista PC with a tower on the floor, and I am constantly ridiculed for my ‘out-of-date’ equipment.  It’s comfortable, safe, does everything I currently need.  Once I was the cutting-edge; now I’m the backwards!
            Well, this newest generation of computers will probably always remind me what I did to my mother before she retired the hair brush:  in its own language, with a blank stare, it's suggesting, 'the only reason you are spanking me is because you've lost your wits and can't think of anything intelligent to say.'
 
 
 ©1992 "hysteria" magazine   published Spring 1993 issue {I own the rights} some updates re 2017 added