Technoloss is threatening to prevent me from communicating, listening and watching. It occurred without me even being aware of the changes. I was ahead of the curve until this past decade. Lack of understanding the terms and the icons is shutting me down. How do I get over the mindset that it is too late for me to learn as no one I know is patient enough to delve into my lack of understanding. It’s not a matter of just do it. I don’t even know what I need or why I need it. Do I keep my head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t matter-that I can keep on doing the little bit that I know to sufficiently function?
I was born before televisions were part of a household. I was six when a black and white T.V. came home. There were three channels that the rooftop antennae pulled in. One channel was local and had a good picture and sound. The other two stations were sixty miles away and could be watched if one ignored the snow or the double images that appeared. There was Walter Cronkite appearing during our dinner with numbers as to those killed in Vietnam and gruesome pictures that we watched while we ate steak and mashed potatoes. The potatoes were fixed with our only small household appliance-an electric mixer. Then came November 1963…three days of nonstop television watched across the country and perhaps the world. Tears were shed as we watched forever touched by the little boy saluting his father as the cortege rolled by.
Cable became part of our living room in 1967 when a color television in a big oak cabinet arrived for Christmas. I was fourteen by then and had a transistor radio, clock-radio and a one speaker record player. I could work them all. The transistor radio brought stations from all over the United States and I could listen to it under my pillow at night, for so long as the battery held out, without parental interference. That battery was a 9-volt used today in so many smoke detectors. To me it is still a transistor radio battery which causes confusion when I ask a twenty-something clerk where I can locate one in a store. The clock radio was wonderful and I still envision it as my favorite childhood gift. It had a lever that would let me listen to music for up to 60 minutes as a I drifted off to sleep. Many a night the lever would be flipped several times as I fought sleep and enjoyed the music of Herman’s Hermits, the Monkees and the Beatles. I could hear the words sung and knew the words of most songs. Life was good. I belonged. The record player was easy to operate. Stack the records four or five high and listen hoping that the needle was in sync with the next record dropped or that the needle didn’t stick on a bad place on the record. The color television with cable was like being at the movies-like the days my father spoke of news reels bringing news of World War II at the movies only in real time. More tears…Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy—sitting up all night holding vigil to hear whether Bobby Kennedy would live. Peace demonstrators were shown being beaten and pulled off to jail. Republican parents who supported the President influenced my thoughts of the war being just.
I received a manual typewriter for Christmas in the mid-1960’s and used it until 1977, when I purchased an electric typewriter. I learned to hunt and peck and ruined any chances of typing without looking at the keys. My lack of proficiency with those things mechanical had begun. In the early 70”s there were college term papers typed on erasable paper and copies made through use of carbon paper. Lines would tend to have a blur with all the erasures and retypes. Erasable paper was a gift to the non-proficient typist-just use the pink penciled shaped eraser and brush the eraser rubbings from the paper being careful not to rub too hard under threat of the appearance of a irreparable hole in the paper. I made it through college and law school happy as a lark with this technology.
