2024, Family, Mysteries, Poems

Pilgrimage

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“Alexa please tell me the meaning of ‘pellegrinaggio’.”

I was reading a book of poetry by Barbara Kingsolver (How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) and came across “pellegrinaggio” as the title to the first poem in a section on a trip she made with family members to Italy.

Pellegrinaggio

At the end of the long-bowling alley lane
of a transatlantic flight, we crash and topple
like pins in the back of a Roman taxi.
split or spare, hard to say what we are but
family, piled across one another: husband
and wife, our two daughters, his mother
Giovanna who has waited eight years
to see what she’s made of.

Her parents, flung out from here like messages
in bottles, washed up on a new shore and grew
together. Grew celery for the Americans. Grew this
daughter who walked to school, sewed a new
cut of skirt, and became the small interpreter
for a family. They took her at her word but stamped
a map called home on a life she believed would end
before she could ever come here to find it.

What other gift could we give her? But now our taxi
crawls like a green bottlefly through the ear canals
of a city, it is half-past something I can’t stand
one more minute of, and I wonder what we were
thinking. We all might die before we find a place
to lie in this bed we’ve made for her. Beside me
she sits upright, mast of our log-pile ship in this bottle.
Made of everything that has brought us this far.

Alexa coughed up a very thorough definition (pilgrimage) and then surprisingly asked me if the information she had given me was useful.  I said “Yes, thank you.”  YA came into my doorway and asked me why I do that.  I wasn’t sure what she was referring to so she said “why do you always say please and thank you when you’re asking Alexa something?  You know it’s not actually a person?”

I DO know that Alexa isn’t a person. However she does represent the work of a lot of people and is certainly programmed to sound like a person.  I’m not sure when I started saying please, thank you and no thank you when interacting with Alexa.   In this world that seems increasingly abrasive and mean, it just feels nice to me to be polite, even if I’m the only one if affects.

And to my credit I actually rarely say thank you – only if she is waiting for an answer, such as her wishing to know how her definition of pellegrinaggio played out.

Do you have any little quirks/habits that others give you grief for?

26 thoughts on “Pilgrimage”

    1. Oh John, hope you’re still on today. I wanted to let you know that a couple of weeks ago I made your waffles and now I have a new favorite waffle recipe. Thank you.

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  3. I say “please” and “thank you” to Siri too.

    I met a woman in our Fiber Friends group who asks Siri everything. She also insults and berates Siri for giving her the wrong answer, or one she didn’t want. Every time something comes up, she goes straight to her phone and asks about it. Last week we were talking about blue crabs. I remembered something from a PBS show about “blue” and “crabs” in which crabs were being used in a laboratory to extract something from their blood that is used in medicine. So she went straight to her phone and asked Siri about “medicine from crabs.” Your imagination should be able to do the rest. Ten women almost fell on the floor laughing at what Siri had to say about crabs.

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  4. Oh, let me count the ways! Husband dislikes being asked what his preferences are about the meal, if the food is/was OK… but at least he’ll usually tell me that, rather than just stew silently.

    I’m sure I’ll remember others throughout the day…

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  5. My own little quirk or habit may be worrying too much about what others think. I also tend to be noticeably OCD, especially when I’m nervous. People at work used to give me grief about some of my little OCD habits. They’re harmless though, and I don’t understand why I can’t be allowed to disinfect the kitchen counter 7 or 8 times if it helps with my anxiety.

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  6. I usually play golf with used/found golf balls, so the purists who believe they need to use a new ball every round give me crap about it, but all in good fun. And for the record, the best score I ever recorded was achieved playing a scuffed up old Top Flite XL2000, which was reviled back then by purists who insisted they were inferior to Titleist Pro V1s and other premium golf balls.

    Chris in Owatonna
    (Don’t forget to vote tomorrow if you haven’t already!)

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  7. I assume that my habit of clearing my throat (leftover from my last bout of bronchitis 20-odd years ago) is annoying, but no one has said in so many words. My housemate says she uses it to locate me in stores when she can’t see where I’ve gone.

    –Crow Girl

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      1. in five years 90% of her correspondence will be with AI if we let manners and kindness go away habitually because we’re talking with AI there won’t be any kindness or humanity left

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  9. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    A Quirkmeister here, too. I must make my bed in the morning to move on to the next thing. Making my bed does not matter to anyone, and it does not change the world in any way. I just do it because I like it.

    We do not have Alexa here, we have the Google version of it. I did stop saying please and thank you to it. But sometimes it will not stop broadcasting after I ask it to. So then I say, “Google, shut the F*** Up!” It still won’t turn off if it gets into that rhythm. I must unplug it to make it stop, but it is very satisfying and rebellious.

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  10. I don’t know if husband’s lady friend is Siri, but I know he asks her all kinds of questions, and sometimes he has a hard time shutting her up, too. I don’t have Siri – or whomever is lurking in my computer and cell – activated, I prefer to look things up myself.

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  11. I have a space between a front tooth and a fake tooth next to it where food gets stuck. I can remove it by forcing air through it. Daughter erupts when she hears me do it.

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  12. Once when I was asking for something from Bixby, the Samsung version of Alexa or Siri, and I wasn’r getting anything even remotely like like I wanted, I vented a little at Bixby. After many exchanges, I said : You’re useless.” Bixby responded with a rather perky enjoinder that was something like, “Well, I’m getting better every day.” Bixby’s tone was upbeat, but also slightly abashed. Although I know Bixby is not a real person, I felt a little chastised. As if I should have been more gentle with it.

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