Watchin' The Indian

My beloved Minnesota Public Radio did a report earlier this year on how nobody knows how to be bored anymore. Everywhere we go we have music, phone service, coffee in dandy to go cups, and advertising. And those advertisers have had to go from 60 second commercials to 30 second commercials to 15 second commercials as the national tolerance for Attention Span Theater has dropped straight into the cellar. We need to be bored, we were taught when we were young, so we could learn what to do when we are bored. 1950's Zen, but Zen, n'est pas?

Us kids, in my mother's huge Victorian house, used to get up early on Saturday morning and wait for the TV to come back on. We would curl up in my mother's soft blankets, with bowls of cereal and the front parlor TV on with the sound turned completely down, watching for the test pattern to turn into the Mighty Mouse cartoon show. We were allowed to do this because all the adults back then, including the adults in Mama's house, considered this placid waiting charmingly goofy and filled with self-entertaining boredom-dealing that was considered a virtue in those days. Back before cable TV, little towns only got TV signals between about seven a.m. and midnight. The rest of the time, they put up a test pattern, with a profile of a very politically incorrect Indian on it. We called it "Watchin' The Indian."

There used to be huge stretches of great gobbly boredom built into this society. We were raised to tolerate boredom. Remember visiting elderly friends and relatives of your parents? You were expected to sit on the secondarily nice furniture and behave yourself by being politely and quietly bored out of your mind. Sermons were 90 minutes to two hours long. Special events often involved speeches. Big. Long. Speeches. Sometimes one right after the other.

School used to incorporate boredom as a social skill. And the art of entertaining oneself, once again very quietly, in queues and waiting rooms, was the stuff of legends. When all we had was one another, the braver ones of us interacted with each other. I was in a Carlos O'Kelly's waiting area when an impromptu spelling bee broke out. I have been at a big outdoor concert where a series of objects for a homemade wine and cheese sampling were passed down the long, long rows of audients. And my pal Andy, the absolute King of Boredom Management, can recite whole movie plots from memory in the most fascinating way. He is the absolute best companion in the world to fall into a good two-hour wait with.

All this came to mind because I was in the girly-girl scary waiting room of the Mammography Unit at the big, downtown St. Paul hospital yesterday early. They took away our purses and cell phones and water bottles, put us all in matching mauve kimono tops and put us in this waiting room. There was a very elderly Hispanic woman with a hospital translator, a woman who was crying, a very quiet obviously lesbian woman, a teenager, and me. When i realized that they were going to take everything away from us, I very quietly kept my newspaper with me. I learned in grad school how to read the daily paper in about five minutes flat, and I knew I could get rid of the paper before I got busted. I sat down between the lesbian and the crying woman. Minnesotans can be a very preternaturally quiet, self-contained bunch, but the next woman that came in said, "Let's read the newspaper together." We got the crying woman to stop crying and start talking about the obituary pictures. We got the lesbian to show us how she had smuggled in her cell phone in her cargo shorts. And we made fun of our mauve tops and got the teenager to giggle for us. It was just a little bit of Watchin' the Indian but it surely was nice. In such a scary situation, with nothing but ourselves. The Cameraderie of Boredom.