NO

                                                                

            Sometimes the smallest moment can make your day. We were in the new condo, setting things up and putting things away. My job was to go through our hundreds of CDs to choose which to keep and which to send to a new home. We had purchased a fancy little CD player which included a radio, clock, and probably some other stuff I have yet to discover.

 

            The device came with a remote with lots of buttons on it. One of them, labeled “OPEN / CLOSE,” was to be used insert and remove CDs. Well, perhaps predictably, when I attempted to play a CD, I pushed the wrong button. Immediately on the small screen where the clock had been there appeared the word “NO.”

 

            Somehow the simplicity of the message was very appealing. In my head I could hear the voice, perhaps an echo of the same word said to me numerous times over the last 83 years. My mind went to the engineer who programmed the “NO” into my machine. Did he have a tone of voice in mind? There was no exclamation point, though he did use all capital letters, and he did not add, “you idiot” to his message. Sometimes a simple “NO” is more than adequate.

 

            I’m not sure why this small event made my day. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the moment, so unlike the nuanced ambiguity that makes up so much of our communication these days . . ..