The garage door opener

One button, one receiver, one motor mounted to a rail bolted along the garage ceiling, and a range that the manual claims exceeds two hundred feet but which in practice fails reliably at the far end of the driveway, forcing a small, undignified U-turn back into range. Four hours on hold with an insurance company, the same eleven seconds of hold music looping past the point of recognition and into something closer to a mantra, teaches a person to recognize manufactured waiting anywhere, and the garage door opener produces its own compressed version, six or seven seconds rather than four hours: the button is pressed, the motor engages with a mechanical throat-clearing, the chain or belt begins its slow pull, and the door rises in stages, pausing very slightly at each panel joint, as though considering whether to continue. Nobody watches this happen anymore. The button is pressed from inside a moving car, the door already rising by the time the driver looks up, the whole sequence relegated to peripheral vision. But stand in the driveway some evening with nothing else to do and watch the full six seconds unfold: the door lifting one panel at a time out of the dark, the garage interior gradually revealed like something being remembered rather than simply opened. It is a small ceremony performed daily for an audience of no one, and it happens exactly the same way every single time, which is more than can be said for most ceremonies still practiced by anyone.

H. G. Plimsoll