My mother said those words to me hundreds or thousands, or perhaps only a few dozen times. They were the words that stuck, the instruction that carried over into my dreams where I routinely switch characters. I might be me for a while, but then the other person. I consider how the other person feels. This hasn’t always meant I was as kind or considerate as my mother intended. It did mean that I sometimes see another’s side so clearly that I feel what they feel. That is what I like to think she hoped for.

There were other things family expressions, lines from poetry and plays. “Bend them to your will” their ironic favorite in reference to children. My parents sang lines from Gilbert and Sullivan—how lucky was I to have been born in such a household! Mom didn’t answer questions about her family, always claiming she didn’t know and I should ask my aunt, who would pass the question back to Mom. But she genuinely didn’t remember, or never knew, the source of “‘We’re lost,’ the captain shouted as he staggered down the stairs!” I checked on line and found “no results.” What does that even mean?

On the other hand, that’s the way family expressions often work. People share an experience that includes a phrase and then repeating that phrase reconnects them to a memory. Laughter ensues. Gary and I have several expressions we use between the two of us. “No problem.” “Too much baggage.” We know exactly what those lines mean and who said them originally and why they were funny to us at the time. They made us laugh when they were first spoken in our presence and we repeat them for that laugh. Recently, we found another one. “What’s a maple bar?”

Milk was 3¢ when I was in Kindergarten. It came in a recyclable glass bottles and my mother gave me pennies each day to pay for it, because the milk was cheaper than store-bought. On Fridays, there were maple bars, barely crispy around the edges because they’d been made that morning. They cost 5¢ and sometimes my mother gave me a nickel. Gary has a similar memories, though his are in Arizona. Milk in bottles. Maple bars. Everything was cheaper then.

This past week we searched Whole Foods for maple bars. The bakery department. Snack foods. An employee could see we were hunting for something and asked if they could help. “Maple bars,” we said, and the young person looked puzzled. I described a maple bar: “It’s a rectangular doughnut,” I show the shape between my fingers, “with maple frosting.” A pause. Oh, yeah, they thought maybe they’d once had those. They directed us to the departments we’d already search. Ever since, Gary has been saying, “What’s a maple bar?” New Seasons had them for $3 each. Not as good, Gary insisted, as the ones we got in grade school that were crispy with grease at the edges. It is increasingly a sign that our world has changed, set standards and procedures, created values and habits and begun taking all this for granted.

Technology is one example, maybe the main one. We opened a new online checking account. The bank person talked on and on, while all I wanted was to look at the paperwork. I would need to move my automatic deposits to arrive in the new account by June in order to earn a bonus. Changing my pension was simple. Log on, go in circles for a few rounds, and finally find the right question to type in on the correct page, download the form, fill it out, print it off and mail it. A week later I received email confirmation and assurance that the change would occur the following month.

The next change required I spent over an hour establishing my identity in order to access Social Security online. There was more of the around and around, photographing my face and the front and back of my ID. Then, actually on the SS website, I did another dance and eventually, after receiving codes on my phone, and getting lost a couple of time, I found where I needed to be and SS knew it was me. And then I was given the option of changing my bank for the auto-deposit to the middle of June or July. I needed it changed by the end of May. I called back the local bank and was told that another customer had no problem at all and made the change with no problem and instantly. I feel like people are always telling me that the task I’ve struggled with for hours is “easy.” Our sons both seem to assume that procedures we find nearly impossible will be effortless.

We’re old, but not doddering. Still, the times are changing without us.

I told Gary he would need to change his own pension and SS. Gary tried logging into his Social Security account for about an hour and then we worked on it together. The ID again. Assume another hour or so before we got to the step where we upload photos of ID. “Message not received,” it might have told us several times. I started over. We received confirmation that Social Security recognized Gary. And then more time round and round, without progress, until we gave up. Next week we will drive thirty minutes to the Warrenton Social Security office which is tucked away north of Costco near the end of a dead end street. We’ll go together. We have passports.

[Recently, several young and middle-aged people have commented to me, “I don’t know if Social Security will be around for me.” They don’t even seem sad about it. You know what political party wants you to think that Social Security won’t last? You know what political party has campaigned for decades to get you to believe that? We are a wealthy nation by any measure, capable of ensuring the safety and comfort of all our citizens, birth to death. It’s just that some people, a very small number of very rich people, want all the benefit to be theirs. They have been thinking ahead, planning how to deprive you of the social safety net created early in the last century. We could have fixed it. We could have updated and repaired the Social Security system by deducting from the income of richer people, and the IRS could be better functioning in order to allow them to more efficiently do their jobs. We still could fix it. It’s not even a complicated update. It might not happen because they’re convinced people it can’t be done. The very rich don’t care about your retirement, they don’t care what’s fair or reasonable, and they don’t want the IRS to become better at collecting the taxes they owe. We’re talking Deadly Sins here: Greed and maybe Envy. To be envious of another’s good fortune is a sin, but this is something particularly ugly, because it is resentment that others can achieve modest security while they sit on a golden throne.]

The world has changed. It will go right on changing. I use my computer every day. I began teaching PageMaker and InDesign from the time they were created. But I do not know what all the buttons and symbols on my phone mean. I don’t recognize emojis. I routinely “do the math” about anything involving numbers, and my memory is long. I was there and paying attention when Nixon lied, when Ronald Reagan refused to admit that AIDS existed, when Hilary Rodham Clinton, following Ted Kennedy’s trail, worked tirelessly to create a national healthcare system in the early 1990s. The rightwing rich shot it all to pieces by convincing the people it would have benefitted that it wouldn’t. Does no one remember this? What’s a maple bar?

People lose track of the past, and that means they will make mistakes in their future. They make assumptions that are lies meant to deprive them, give up on easy fixes, take for granted atrocities that we should have learned to avoid altogether. War, poverty, disease, hunger. Who taught you those things are necessary?

We survived as a species because we took care of one another. The “rugged individualism” is a myth, and not even a benign myth. It is a lie promoted by an elite too selfish to care. Humans are social creatures. There are too many of us in the world today—our population has overrun the planet—but we were never meant to be alone. We are meant to care for one another; it’s the only way we survive.

We walked to Powell’s for a reading the other day, and the author admitted that she didn’t have any background and hadn’t done any research about archaeology or visited an archeological site, despite having that opportunity, before writing a novel about an archaeologist.

What’s a maple bar?