Unbelievable

I’ve always been a big fan of hand-me-downs, much to the dismay of the child who had to wear his sibling’s outgrown clothing. The same principle guides our family’s phone decisions, so when someone gets a new cellphone, we always check to see if the phone being replaced can be of use to another family member. That’s how I ended up with a “new-to-me” phone, same model but with lots more storage than my previous one. All it needed was a new battery.

 

Car, hearing aid, flashlight – we replace batteries all the time and get on with life. After I stood in line for my appointment to get the battery replaced in my “new” phone, imagine my surprise when the tech said, “We can’t replace this battery – this phone is ineligible for battery replacement.” Why? Some lame excuse that it had already been replaced once. Translate that to: you should upgrade and buy a newfangled phone. No thanks. I don’t have the extra cash under my mattress, nor do I have the brain capacity to deal with an upgraded phone. I just want a new battery for the one I have. Is that too much to ask?

 

While I do attempt to practice kindness when in a retail store, as I left the counter, I kept muttering, “unbelievable.” Did I really tell that tech that I write a newspaper column or did I just think those words?

 

I’ve been saying the word “unbelievable” quite a bit in the past few weeks. It escaped my lips as I read about Buffy Wicks, the California assemblyperson who was on maternity leave, but was told she couldn’t vote remotely or by proxy on a housing bill of importance to her. She had to travel with her month-old baby to the floor of the house to vote – in the midst of a pandemic. The response from the speaker’s office: “Only members at a higher risk from Covid-19 will be considered eligible for proxy voting. This bar of eligibility was always intended to be high, to ensure the protection of our legislative process.” What about the protection of your legislators – or their newborn babies? At the same time, the California senate has been making arrangements for remote voting for weeks. Unbelievable.

 

Also from California this week: a gender reveal party in El Dorado Ranch Park in Yucaipa used a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device that torched a blaze. To date, 10,000 acres damaged. Unbelievably, it’s not even the first time this has happened. In 2017, it was 45,000 acres in Arizona, involving an arrow and a target filled with the highly explosive Tannerite. CNN reports of the 2017 incident: “It was a boy, and the party ended up costing the guilty patrons more than $8 million in restitution.” Unbelievable.

 

Then there’s the article from The Atlantic about the military and its commander-in-chief, which included words such as “sucker” and “loser” to describe American armed forces. I repeated the same phrase a number of times: “unbelievable.” Khizr Khan, a Gold Star father, was more eloquent: “Words we say are windows into our souls.” They sure are, Mr. Khan.

 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, and author of the renowned novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” tells of tricks he learned from journalism to “transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible.” According to Marquez, the key is to “tell it straight, commonly done by reporters and country folks.” Should anyone else be added to that list? I’ve recently gotten about halfway through his novel, and he definitely took his own advice, creating a magic realism that is, well, unbelievable. 

 

On the NPR program, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, a favorite game is “Bluff the Listener.” The panelists paint three scenarios, and only one is true. I used to be pretty good at eliminating the imposters, but now I often have no clue, as just about anything is believable – or not. 

 

My mother used to warn me: “if it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” However, in 2020, if it’s too crazy to be true, all bets are off. Unbelievable!