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Popular Culture Review
effort to “keep up” and to “buy time.” But, we never seem to manage to do either.
Each new “convenience” commits us to additional monthly bills, extra maintenance
and equipment, a steep learning curve, and a slightly altered way of behaving. On
average, we work more now than we did 25 years ago and we are in far greater
debt. We are bent under the weight of our possessions and ruled by our own
technologies.
And still, propelled along by our growing dependence and vulnerabihty we
search for ways to “fix” our lives. But this assumes that there is such a thing as “a
fix” and that life itself is something that needs fixing. These are certainly debatable
assumptions. Less debatable is the object of our search. Basically, we want the
same things now that we have always wanted — to have the time to care for and
enjoy our children, our neighbors and our friends and to be well cared for in return.
We want to be secure, to be stimulated, and to have leisure time sufficient to marvel
at the seasons and watch the clouds float by. Simply put, we want to belong, to be
known, and to actively connect with a hving earth.
And here is the ultimate irony. We are sacrificing the very things that mean so
much to us. We have lost sight of them as anything other than an inconvenience.
When a refrigerator turned family scrap book and bulletin board becomes an
impediment to the daily routine, it is time to reexamine our daily routine, our
relationships, our priorities, and our lives. It is not time to buy another piece of
organizational hardware. It is time to jump out of the pot.
A decorated refrigerator is hardly an elegant image. But therein hes its power.
It can be easily appropriated by ordinary human beings and used as metaphor.
Metaphors are wonderful things. They fire our imaginations. They provide us with
a shorthand to sort through vast sets of meanings and relationships. They are
analogies that move across seemingly endless and unrelated contexts. They are
creative abstractions that help us visualize reaUty and shape it in return.
A decorated refrigerator flapping with colorful messages and odd bits of
personal history is just such a metaphor. It holds open a vital space at the center of
our lives — a space that is familiar, accessible and accepting, where the medium is
often the message, where neatness doesn’t count for much, and where magic and
memory do. It is a place for people, a place at once too ahve and too complex for
Audrey™. This is fine with me. She’s not someone I’d want to eat breakfast with
anyway.
Michigan State University
Laura B. DeLind