It's Not TW0,000 Late
By SAM ORBAUM
Get ready: Tomorrow we wake up to... January 1, 1800.
The kids are pulling hairs out of my arm. It works. I awaken.
"Wuzza?"
"Daddy, are you sick?"
"Hangover. New Year's Eve. Sleep now. Bzzzz..."
"Daddy, what's a hangover?"
"Oyyyy."
"Oh."
They clamp their hands on my mouth and nose. It works. I awaken again.
"Daddy, the TV's not working. Geddup. Do something. We're bored."
"What time is it?" I ask.
"Dunno. Your clock-radio isn't working either."
"And the lights."
"Daddy, nothing's working. It's creepy."
My eyes blink open. January 1, 2000. It's happening. I'm not going to
sleep through this!
"Awright, I'm up, I'm up. Let's see if the toilet's working."
It's not.
Nor the kettle.
"You know what we have here, girls?"
"Yeah, I heard about this. We've gone ahead into the year 2000!"
"No, my sweet. We've gone back into the year 1800."
"Now it's creepy and spooky."
"Y'know, people actually lived like this once. Maybe we should try it.
By the look of it, we have no choice."
"Daddy, we can try it later. First, fix the TV. We have to watch the
cartoons."
"Have to?"
"Have to."
The only "have tos" at this moment are the morning urgencies. I
stagger tipsily out of bed, but the kids are blocking the way.
"You're not thinking of using the indoor plumbing, are you Daddy?"
"If you will excuse me..."
"Uh-uh. If we're going to try living like in 1800, you first have to
dig a big hole in the garden, then build a hut over it, and then you
can pee."
"OUTTA MY WAY!"
"And forget about coffee this morning, not until you've gathered wood,
chopped it, and made a fire with flint to boil water which you have to haul
up from the well."
Well, well. It seems the kids now like the idea of playing "1800." I
remind them that child labor was in vogue back then, and if anyone is going
to do all that work, it's them. They let me pass.
"Daddy, hurry up and finish, we've got trouble!"
"What now?"
"Injuns, Daddy! Injuns're a-comin'! We can hear them."
All I can hear is the neighborhood car alarms, set off by The Bug. But
yes, it does sound like the ululating woo-woo-woo of a full-scale
attack by Inj- uh, Native Americans.
It would be pretty embarrassing to be scalped by Iroquois on the first
day of the 21st century, so I order the womenfolk into the stronghold.
"What's that, Daddy?"
"The air-raid shelter. And get the candles. I'll bring some leftovers
- I mean, preserves - and we can have lunch there."
Safe from the invasion, I remind my progeny that it is politically
incorrect nowadays to stereotype "Injuns" and portray them as savages.
"We know, Daddy, but you're forgetting: It's not nowadays today."
"Of course."
We eat lunch, which the kids complain is not very
turn-of-the-19th-century-ish. I concede that we could have done better than
egg and tuna sandwiches, but we had to run for our lives, which was very
1800ish. And anyway, I reasoned, egg and tuna and bread aren't exactly
inventions of the Computer Age.
So now we're sitting there, the four of us, with nothing but candles,
and I can't say we're having any fun. Being as they're modern children, it
takes not one minute before they're bored out of their minds. It doesn't
help when I point out that we may be pinned down until the Cavalry comes,
which could take days.
What to do?
Well, what did they do back then?
"We could sing songs," I suggest. We had never done that.
Problem is, I don't know much from before the '50s.
The solution, of course, is nursery rhymes, those Moldy Oldies folks
have been singing for a good thousand years or so.
In the flickering dimness, our shadows dancing about us, we harmonize
a lusty medley of traditional favorites, starting with "Hickory, Dickory
Dock" and somehow ending up with "Lecha Dodi." Nothing wrong with being both
Early Industrial Revolution
The last of the candles snuff out, so we agree that the danger must
have passed by now, and we go back into the house.
"Hey, maybe the TV's working - or at least the video." Tragically, not.
I don't know how long this game will last, but I've got to think of
something - something radical. I sense the citizenry is getting restless,
and a rebellion is afoot.
"Y'know what?" I say brightly, "We can read!"
"Read?"
"Yeah, like, books. That's what people did when there was
nothing to do!"
It was a terrible idea. It was precisely because people had nothing to
do but read that it became necessary to start wars back then.
The kids hadn't even noticed that we have books in the house.
I pull one off the shelf, dust it off, and fake a bit of enthusiasm
(truth be told, I'd rather be watching TV too). "Ever hear of Robinson
Crusoe? It's about this guy who gets marooned on an island with no
electricity. Sort of like us."
"And people were reading it in 1800?"
"Absolutely."
They fall for it. After a while I'm getting bored, so I suggest
we play chess, or backgammon, or marbles.
"Shh!" they say. "We're reading."
This is a good opportunity for me to uphold a grand old tradition we
Orbaum men have been doing for centuries: take a nap.
I awaken to the sound of the phone ringing, and Pavlovianly, I jump
out of bed. But it's a child, standing at my door, faking the sound of a
phone ringing.
"I'm hungry. What time is it?"
"Dunno. I'll check." I look out the window and examine the positioning
of the sun. "Hmm. Just a few minutes to suppertime."
"Goody! We're starved!"
Whoa there. I can't just pop something out of the freezer and into the
microwave, because we ain't got neither here in 1800. "Guess I'll have to go
bag a buffalo," I say. "Meantime, you - bake us some bread; you - milk the
cow and churn us some butter; and you - off to the forest and bring back a
mess of mushrooms, tubers, whatever you can rustle up. Whoever finishes
first can get a fire going."
They whimper. These days, making a hungry kid wait five minutes for
victuals constitutes child abuse, and I could go to jail for that. Besides,
here in the middle of a 21st century Israeli metropolis, where am I going to
find a buffalo?
The zoo!
It might work, if I can get past the lions and tigers and security
personnel.
"Can't we just pretend?" a famished child beseeches. "Call Domino's,
and we'll make like we're Italians from long ago."
I'm peckish myself. But there's a problem. "Look, we might as well be
pretending this is 1999 as 1800. Fact is, nothing's working today. We've
become positively Stone Age."
"So let's invent fire."
Of course! The barbecue!
In minutes we have a chicken crackling on the spit and a pot o' potage
boiling up. We dig out some yams from the pantry, throw 'em into the fire,
and cut up a few veggies we have to assume people ate back then too.
Faster than you can say "Beelzebub," supper is history. There's a nip
in the air but a warmth in our bellies. We snuggle up around the fire, too
stuffed to move, too content to want to.
"Is this really how people lived back then?" a child asks.
"Darn tootin' right it is. According to my gran'pappy, who heard it
from his gran'pappy, whose great-gran'pappy was probably your age at that
time, this is how it was. The story passed down through the generations goes
like this..."
When is the last time you sat under a tree and captivated your
children with fables of folklore? When's the last time the TV was turned off
and the kids were turned on?
OK, so I'm making up the tales, but it doesn't matter. TV does the
same thing.
It's not even bedtime yet, but the children are done for. It has been
a long, adventurous day, the first day of the 21st century. A thought occurs
to me: In their wildest imaginations, children back in 1800 would never have
believed the future would be like this. Like a day in their own lives.
My young'uns climb into bed and give me a mighty hug, the glow of the
fire still on their faces.
"Y'know, Daddy, this was a lot of fun, living in the good old days."
"Maybe tomorrow everything will be back to normal, and we'll be back
in the present day."
"Mmmmm," they sigh drowsily.
They drift off into dreamland, and I begin to wonder how I'm going to
kill the rest of this day. I plop down onto the couch. I'm sitting on
something, and I squirm.
It's the remote control.
What the heck: I press the "power" button.
A garish blue beam fills the dark room. Great, I think, it's working!
What could be better!
I zip through the channels, all the way to 48, pausing now and then.
MTV. The Fashion Channel. The Shopping Channel. Truck-racing on
Sports. Bad news on News. A moronic sitcom on 3, a moronic movie on 4, a
nasty debate on Israel TV, soccer everywhere else.
Aw, what the hell.
I turn it off, as a radical new idea comes to me.
I've seen the movie, but I never actually read Robinson Crusoe.
Call me old-fashioned, but there's still so much I haven't done from
the long-forgotten second millennium.
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