Head in the Sand ... and other unpopular positions (3 page)

His first impulse is to do a Google search
for “belt sander” to see if the manufacturer has a thousand-page
schematic he can print out and stuff in a desk drawer until 2037. I
remind him that we have just dismantled the computer and moved it
out of the living room so we can rip up the carpet.

He mumbles things I’ve only heard on cable
TV and sits down in the middle of the bare wooden floor, pondering
the sander from every angle. I watch him from across the room,
fascinated, the same way Jane Goodall watches chimps. Before he can
start grooming me for lice, I suggest that he call my dad, who owns
every power tool known to mankind and sorts them in his garage by
size and function. (He’s retired and has nothing better to do than
fix things that aren’t broken yet.)

Wayne ignores me and taps
the sander with a ball peen hammer.
Tap.
Tap. Tap
. I admire his manly way of taking
charge. He grunts, then snorts. Then grunts again. I admire him
some more.

I cross the room to the
phone and call my dad, asking him if he owns a similar belt sander.
Naturally, he does. Wayne sits with his back to me, his derriere
collecting jagged edges of floorboard with the same speed my
daughter collects Barbie shoes. I say loudly and not-at-all subtly,
“Dad,
he’s right here
,” and then hand Wayne the phone. It is a short
conversation.

“
Uh-huh . . . .
Ohhhhh.”

Wayne grabs a screwdriver, winds up, and
whacks the side of the sander, which makes a small clicking
noise.

“
Huh. You’re right. It
worked.”

Another home repair
problem solved. And no head lice. Jane Goodall would be so
proud.

Technology turned our
mother-daughter relationship upside down. Without being asked, I
had become the mommy of my mommy. I was the one in charge, teaching
her so that she might one day toddle out on her own and forge her
way in the Brave New World.

The Brave New World, that is, of
cyberspace.

It started innocently
enough back in the mid-nineties. While most older folks were moving
to Florida, my parents retired at age fifty-five and moved two
thousand miles away to Las Vegas. It was drier and warmer than
Pennsylvania, they said. It was dirt cheap to live there, they
said. It was their one big adventure in life, they said. This’ll
never work, I said.

My brother and I bit our lips and let them
go with a kiss and a prayer—and a roll of nickels.

It soon became obvious
that the distance was going to be more daunting than anyone had
anticipated. Despite the technology of the telephone, contact
became more sporadic because it was costly—and because of the time
difference. They now lived in a world of early rising, 110-degree
“it’s-a-dry-heat,” and four
p.m.
cheap buffets on the Strip. By the time the phone
rates dropped at the end of their day, they themselves had dropped
hours earlier, snoozing during
Murder, She
Wrote.

I’ve been online since
1988 and I know the value of quick, cheap communication such as
e-mail. One day a few years ago I casually mentioned to a friend
that it would be nice to get a cheap, secondhand computer for my
parents so they could get online and keep in touch better. Soon I
was offered a free low-end 286 computer and monitor.
[
Author’s Note:
There’s no such thing as a free lunch—or a free computer.]
With a little tweaking, my parents could use it to get
started.

Several hundred dollars later, I was
belatedly rethinking my strategy.

My mother seemed more eager than my dad to
venture into this new technology. She had, after all, used
customized computer programs in her job as a quality control
technician for the Crayola crayon company for years. (My father’s
expertise in high technology had been limited to hot-wiring and
souping up the VCR—apparently so that it would flash “1:00” instead
of “12:00.”)

I timed the arrival of the upgraded computer
at their house to coincide with my visit to them that spring. I
arrived on Tuesday, and the second-day air packages arrived on
Wednesday. I hooked everything up effortlessly and we were on our
way. That week I gave my mom the perfunctory training she’d need to
maneuver around Windows and AOL, and I left Las Vegas confident
that we’d soon be e-mailing and sending instant messages to each
other on a regular basis. After all, how hard was AOL to figure
out?

I swear on the grave of my Tandy 2000 that I
had no sooner stepped in my door and dropped my duffel bag than the
phone rang.

“
Hello?”

“
Linda? Hi! You’re home?
How was your flight?”

“
Fine, Mom. I just got
home. What’s up? Is everything all right?”

“
Everything’s fine. I just
have one teeeeensy question, though.”

Her emphasis on the word “teeeeensy” didn’t
go unnoticed.

“
Go ahead,
shoot.”

“
It’s about the
computer.”

I felt a slight tightening
in my throat, but dismissed it as jetlag
.
Everything is fine…. Everything is fine.

I sat down.

“
Yes?”

“
It won’t turn
on.”

The tightening became a
lump.
Never buy a used
computer
, I thought.

“
What do you mean, it won’t
turn on?”

“
I push in the button like
you showed me, and nothing happens.”

The lump began to pulse
rhythmically. Maybe my dad had hot-wired it.
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here
,
I thought fleetingly.

“
What do you mean, nothing
happens?”

“
I mean, nothing happens.
Zilch. Nothing.”

“
What about the switch on
the monitor?”

“
Nope. Nothing there
either. Weird, huh?”

“
Mom . . . Did you turn on
the power strip first?”

“
What’s a power
strip?”

One problem down. Thirty-seven thousand to
go.

I think I had time to unpack and eat a meal
or two before the next phone call came in.

“
Hi, honey. I hate to
bother you, but. . . . It’s the computer again.”

“
Doesn’t it turn
on?”

“
Oh, it’s on. That’s not
it.”

I felt strangely relieved. She was
teachable, at least.

“
Then what’s the problem?”
I asked.

“
The thingy is
blinking.”

“
The what is
what?”

“
The thingy is
blinking.”

“
Mom, you’ll have to speak
up. It sounds like you’re saying, ‘The thingy is
blinking.’”

“
It IS blinking!” she
insisted. “And I keep hearing this crunching noise.”

Twenty minutes and an entire lack of jargon
later, I ascertained that the “thingy” in question was the hard
disk activity light on the CPU. The crunching noise was, of course,
the hard disk activity indicated by the blinking thingy.

My mother began to get the hang of being
online quickly after that. Soon she could forward joke e-mails to
several hundred of her closest friends and type “LOL ;-) ” in an
instant message window with the best of them. Suddenly I had more
daily contact with my mother than I’d had in the womb. Despite the
cyber-claustrophobia, it was nice to have her feel close again.

Several months went by. Little questions
trickled in now and then.

1.
“I swear I was just gone from the computer for ten minutes,
and I came back and there were these swirling colored lines dancing
all over the screen. Where did everything go?”

2.
“I saved this letter to your brother, and now I can’t find
it. I think the computer hid it from me.”

3.
“I got the picture of the kids you sent me with your e-mail,
but I don’t know how to open it again to show your
father.”

4.
“Okay, I found the picture but when I opened it this time it
took up the whole screen.”

5.
“I tried to install something, but it wouldn’t let me. . . .
What? Honestly, I don’t know. It just kept telling me
no.”

6.
“I know this was a used computer, honey, but I just found
some old folder on here from the previous owner, called ‘Teen
JPGs.’ Don’t tell your father. He’d die.”

After a lot of trial and
error, my mother learned to write down for me exactly what happened
when an error occurred. She now wrote down the information in the
little dialog box with the red “X” before clicking on “OK.” We
began to solve her problems on the first try. And I began to wonder
if I’d missed my calling as a tech support rep.

Other than basic computer training, things
went smoothly. And together, we got that computer tweaked and
humming, and kept her and my dad in touch with the big, wide world.
Then one day I got another call from my mother.

“
Hi, Lindy Lou. . . . How
are ya, honey?”

She’d called me Lindy Lou. She was priming
me for something. Something big.

“
Hi, Mom. What’s
up?”

She sighed. “Ohhh. . . . It’s the computer.
It broke.”

“
What do you mean, ‘it
broke’?”

“
The guy at the shop said
the hard drive died. He said this happens sometimes when hard
drives get older, and it’s probably for the best.”

She sounded as if an old maiden aunt had
died. And was that sniffling I heard on the other end of the
phone?

“
Mom, I’m sorry. I probably
should have saved up more and gotten you a better
computer.”

“
No, it’s okay. I feel bad
since you spent all that time on it. The good news is that your
father and I traded it in for a brand-new computer with everything
on it!”

I could tell how proud and excited she was.
She always said “your father and I” for the big stuff.

This new-fangled contraption had Windows
98—and I was still lumping along with Windows 95. It had enough
bells and whistles to rival all the slots on the Strip. She gushed
on the phone that it did disk cleanup automatically at one o’clock
in the morning, and that it defragmented her hard drive when she
was shopping—things I’d only read about. I tried hard not to get my
knickers in a twist.

Every day I got a dozen e-mails from my mom:
spam about Madalyn Murray O’Hara; forwarded jokes with more
“>>>’s” in every line than actual text; URL links to
online newspaper articles about diseases she was afraid I’d get;
and recipes I’d never use because I don’t routinely keep goat
cheese or spices from as-yet undiscovered countries in my
kitchen.

Despite all the warm, homey contact online,
my life felt strangely hollow. It wasn’t until months later that I
realized what was missing: those unexpected phone calls from my
technologically-challenged mother. She hadn’t had a problem with
her computer in months. On her own, she e-mailed her senator every
week, IMed with her grandchildren, played ten different variations
of Solitaire, designed flyers for the neighborhood casino-zoning
meetings at their house, and successfully installed videocam
software.

It was obvious, even to me, that she was ready. And,
much to my relief, the Brave New World welcomed her with open
arms.

Celebrating Christmas in
southwestern Florida during a historic election year was certainly
unique. Between ballot recounts while watching in horror everyone’s
hanging chads, I had enough time on my hands to compile a list of
rules for living there. It took my mind off the election
brouhaha.

RULE:
At Christmas, you must over-decorate your house with icicle
lights, even though you haven’t seen an icicle since you got that
frost-free refrigerator in 1986.

REASON:
You must trick Santa into thinking it’s cold
enough to show up in that stifling red suit.

RULE:
You must wear sweaters and hats if the temperature dips below
62 degrees.

REASON:
This alerts the tourists that you’re a local when
a wind-chill factor of 58 sends shivers up your spine. This doesn’t
stop you from going to the beach, of course. You just wear
mittens.

RULE:
You must own a car the size of a 40-foot schooner.

REASON:
Most Floridians own cars that can be mistaken for
small yachts in the parking lot of the Winn-Dixie. This is to
protect them from the rare but elusive soccer mom wielding a
dangerous SUV without using her left turn signal.

RULE:
You cannot have a basement.

REASON:
All building contractors in Florida are afraid of
ancient burial grounds. But where do you put the broken bicycles,
chest freezers, and power tools?

RULE:
You must own a two-car attached garage with as much square
footage as your house, even if you own only one car.