I hit the button

 Geraldine

I hit the Button

But it went wrong !!!

What a challenge ! On day 33 after the begining of the Ukranian war, on day 670 after the begining of Covid pandemia in France,  the topic is « Hit the Button ».

 

Well, I hit the button.  « I » have a feeling that nothing will ever be the same since these events are changing the face of the world.  Like other future events linked with climate changes, globalization, North/Southern relations, feeding populations, educating children etc…

 

Hitting a button could do so much good or bring so much sorrow in this world :

I hit the button, and off went my space capsule taking me to the moon.

I hit the button and I heard the most fantastic recording of Mozart’s  40th Symphony, I closed my eyes and there, the music transported me into another world.

I hit the button and just bought, on internet a round the world ticket for a two year trip.

I hit the button and my Magimix cooker just made, in no time,  a very tasty chicken and rice risotto.

I hit the button and the GPS decided in a split second which was the best route to take to go visit my sister in Kent.

I hit the button and began a whattsap conversation with my great friend Christine, in Illinois.  When would she next be in Paris  for our future visits to Museum and exhibitions.

I hit the button and the garage door opened and let me park my car without having to support a drop of the heavy rain around us.

I hit the button, sat confortably in the settee, and watched for, maybe the sixth time in my life, Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quin in Fellini’s masterpiece « La Strada ».

I hit the button and, oh ! it was the wrong one and it brought me down to the second lower ground floor instead of the 67th floor were I wanted to catch the view over Hong Kong’s Bay !

I hit the button and I thought….

Why do I have to depend on a button to get thnigs done.  How did mankind manage before.  And when was before ?

_______________________________________________________________

Jackie

 

I hit the button and regretted it immediately.    It was yellow, shiny, round and plastic and I hit it with strength I didn’t know I had.       Let me tell you why.

I was travelling up a Swiss mountain in a ski lift this winter.     It was over full 20 people maximum allowed ….28 cramped together including children   –it was the start of the season.

We were standing up as there were too many people to allow seating.   All laughing and joking at 9 in the morning, the smell of coffee breath and new ski shoes.  Oww I thought the rented ski boots shoes hurt already and I’d only had them on for an hour  …If you have ever worn these remember that they cover the beginning part of your shins and scrape them as you walk – so you have to learn to put your heel down first and then the toe which takes a little learning to do.  But, in the meantime, your shins get scraped and dug into and they hurt like hell.  I must have bruises or cuts already I imagined.

The doors slid shut and the motor purred a reassuring noise as we started up to the top of the mountain – first in full sunshine then as the cable car made its slow way up into fog and then even thicker fog excluding all views and the atmosphere in the ski cabin became subdued.  

 

 I gripped my ski poles and made to steady myself as the box like  cabin ……swayed from side to side, to and fro above the rocky snowy alps some of which, from where I was,  looked jagged and pointy.     I looked straight down between the clouds and felt dizzy – heights have never been my favorite and I wondered just how long this ride would take

Now everyone knows that Italians are noisy and in this small cabin there were a group of 5 Italian young men, very excited at the prospect of their first day skiing;  gesticulating and practicing their prowess on the slopes showing off how they could bend and take turns but the trouble was we weren’t not yet on the slopes just 600 meters above sharp pointy mountains that seem to stretch into the distance forever.  We were in a small box attached to a steel cable that we couldn’t see but hoped would hold.   

Another passenger overcome with claustrophobia or anxiety couldn’t wait apparently to smoke her cigarette and the cabin was soon filled with fumes and others started to cough and wave away the smoke in front of their eyes.    That is when the uncomfortable situation started to feel itself.    People started to eye each other up and down and as we were all standing up and squashed together the only place you could look was in fact into someone else’s eyes.  Or…in my case being taller than the average on top on someone’s head /helmet.

The Italian group now started to practice jumps – they would hold onto one another’s shoulders and pretend to jump down an imaginary ski slope … until the inevitable happened.  One of them crashed landed knocked someone over and people started to drift over to one side of the cabin car until all 20 people were all piled one on top of the other on the now lopsided right side  – the cable car stopped.   Yes,  just stopped in mid air…it took a few seconds to realize that it had come to a halt and we were swaying gently in the breeze – the gusts of wind that were forecast were to come later on.   There was an eerie silence on board.  Someone started to cry….  The whirring sound that had accompanied until then our ascent into the mountains had ceased.     The Italians now with a worried look on their faces and the lady who smoked had her cigarette knocked onto the floor and squashed.

Panic could be read on everyone’s faces as slowly we realized our situation.   With another 500 meters to the top station and safety we were for the moment stuck in the air – and by the grace of God, held there by a cable, which hopefully was made of some strong something or other to hold up 28 now very scared people.     Black clouds appeared through the now swirling fog and perhaps a storm was on its way …

 

So as I told you at the beginning of this story short may it be …I hit the yellow round plastic button and immediately regretted it.

(to be continued)

 

Annemarie

I Pressed the Button

Little Vovo sat in a bowl of water in the warm summer sun, tipping cupfuls over himself. Just two years old, the blond toddler looked up at his mother:

“Mama, what is this for?” he asked pointing to his stomach.

“That, my dear  Vovo, is your belly button; when you are hungry you just press it and Mama will get you some food,” Vera said laughing and looking at her son fondly.

Vovo experimented with his belly push- button and, yes, it worked. Mama always indulged him.  She made pastries when he wouldn’t eat his bread for breakfast; succumbed to his tantrums and generally allowed his every whim.  Until that is,  his unmarried mother met, fell in love with and married a man from Georgia.

Young Vovo, used to having his own way, had a very unsatisfactory relationship  with  his stepfather and took little notice of him. Vera was given an ultimatum - “either the boy goes or I do.” After much heart-searching and still very much in love with her husband, Vera sent her son to live with his grandparents.  They, however, died soon after his tenth birthday and he was taken in by elderly foster parents who had lost their own two sons when babies.

Life was very different for the boy. A crowded room in a cramped, shared flat; a 'father' who worked in the factory, both his legs having been blown off during the war. His elderly 'mother', he recounted, swept the streets and did odd jobs to earn extra money. The boy's fun lay in harassing the rogue rats around the building's  stairwells until one day he cornered an exceedingly large one. The rat  suddenly turned and jumped on him. Never let yourself be cornered was the lesson learned from this incident.

At school he excelled at history and German but spent most of the time disrupting classes, playing truant, hurling blackboard rubbers at classmates and haranguing the teachers. One teacher realised his potential, harnessed his abilities and helped him enter a school for the gifted. With his blond hair, pouting lips and sleepy eyes there was no lack of female admiration for the sporty, ambitious young man but he had his own romantic  ambition to be a spy, which he realised after he had completed law school.

He had it all - secrets, machinations, dead drops, ciphers. He had leather briefcases with codes, with buttons to press with satisfying clicks. Knowledge was what he  stole or what he withheld from others.

Onwards and upwards he went  right to the top, ordering the elimination of journalists, sending  planes crashing down, ordering wars.

Now he has unleashed a devastatingly cruel attack, one not going his way and  he sits at one end of his  20 foot long, beech table, decorated with gold leaves, the table where world leaders, where his own advisors are distanced from him.

They watch as he puts in the  code with trembling, shaking fingers, they watch as he presses the button. Nothing happens. He tries again , his trembling, quivering hand shaking, his body almost convulsing, but cannot hit the right code. He shouts ‘I pressed the button! Why no bomb?'

“Mr President, Vladimir, you have Parkinson’s and for some time we have been substituting  your medication. You are finished.”