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Show To Every Season y - - - Last week a pleasant young man from the city came by to give us our new address. We were hard put to deny the advantages, as he explained them, of having an actual house number. No more extended long distance calls to the gas company describing our location, no . need for hand drawn maps for friends from out-of-town. Certainly it would make life easier for the UPS man whose resourcefulness in tracking down the proper recipients for the proper parcels has always amazed us. And certainly, an honest-to-goodness numerical address ad-dress would increase our credibility with L.L. Beans, Brookes Brothers and various var-ious other prestigious mail order outfits. Still the tidy white plastic sign with easy-to-read black numerals is sitting around on the coffee table. We have found every excuse imagin able to delay hanging it out on the road. To be honest, we have enjoyed getting packages addressed to The Old Hoyt House. We've taken pleasure in describing the landmarks to relatives driving in for the weekend and it feels quite reassuring reassur-ing to relate to UPS on a first-name basis. Behind our reluctance to tack up the number is a fear that it will attract Dear Occupant mail, traveling salesmen and product surveys. sur-veys. Worse yet, we see it as a symbol of impending suburbanization, of depersonalization, deper-sonalization, of we can't seem to 'escape from it progress. First, they give you a number and then they feed you to their computer. We were just developing a theory of becoming Postal renegades when a close friend who is a data processing consultant back East sent us her thoughts about the potential dangers of technology. In the end, we had to agree she was right. Technology is just a tool, it can make our lives immea-sureably immea-sureably richer or it can dehumanize us. Progress will take its direction from those who learn to control it, not from those who try to avoid it. All weekend, we wrestled with our concept of progress. It colored Sunday's sunset and lent extra meaning to the 6:00 news. In California, a house was built from laying the foundation to plugging in the TV in a record four hours and 18 minutes. A building inspector was on hand to pronounce it sound and finished and we went to sleep that night counting sheep hopping over numbered num-bered gateposts across the valley, NC |