Tech Change

My father merely smiled--perhaps disdainfully?--as technology accelerated past him. He had not been all that adept, even with the technology of the 1950s and 60s. I remember when we got our first stereo system--with remote speakers (late 1950s)--and he had his good friend and Hiram College colleague, chemistry professor Ed Rosser, come over and hook it up for us. Dad virtually never used it--though the rest of us did.

He never really got the hang of an electric typewriter, and when personal computers began to arrive, Dad didn't bother. My mom, though? She was a different story. She had the first computer in the family (I think), an Apple II, and for a printer she used her IBM Selectric; a colleague had helped her install an "interface."

Mom kept up with computers, fairly well. I bought her a couple--as did my brothers. But gradually--inevitably--her ability to use her laptop slipped away, though it sat on her table in the living room of her assisted living place. See, it seemed to say, I'm still here--and she still knows how to use me. Though she didn't. So ... no more e-mail exchanges with Mom; I had to resort to snail-mail--which, by then, she could not even answer.

But Dad, who'd died on Nov. 30, 1999, had gotten into none of it. As long as he was mobile, he did things the Old Way. An attendant pumped his gas for him; he never used an ATM. Cell phone? Ha! I try to imagine my dad at a grocery-store self-checkout. He would have raised his hands heavenward, called out: Take me now, Lord! Please!

My dear friend and teaching colleague Andy Kmetz (who passed away about a year ago in his late 80s) was also resolutely a non-techie. A cassette tape player was about the extent of it. I tried to convince him to get a smart phone--to get on Facebook and e-mail so that the myriads of former students who adored him could get back in touch. Nah. Wasn't gonna happen. And didn't.

I've tried to keep up over the years, have tried to stay moderately agile on computer and Internet (and with grocery store self-checkouts). But I can already feel things beginning to pull away from me. My grandsons (ages 14 & 10) sail around the Internet with an ease that astonishes me.

But--as Joyce and I have discussed many times--I'm so glad I did not grow up in this world. When I was a kid in Oklahoma, there were only two TV stations, and during the two years we lived in Amarillo, Texas (1952-53: Dad had been called back to active duty during the Korean War and was stationed at Amarillo AFB), we had no TV stations. We listened to radio programs. Read books.

When we moved to Ohio in August 1956, Cleveland had only three stations, and our parents restricted our viewing--as, later, we would do with our own son.

But I know too well the Me of Then: If there had been hundreds of TV "stations" (an archaic word now), if I could have watched every Tribe game (instead of, maybe, one a week--all that was on), if there had been ESPN, if there had been an Internet, I don't think I ever would have read a book.

Isn't it silly that so many of us blame kids for the world we created for them? How can we complain, say, about their smart-phone use when we gave them those phones!

I'm old enough to know that things are not going back. And I don't really want them to. The Internet saves me so much time--every day (how easy now to check facts, to find a spot on a map, to find out who that actor was in The Great Escape, to ... you know). Joyce and I both know what an amazing gift the Internet is for writers.

But now and then (okay, every day) I think about my dad, master of the TV remote (the last technological device he ever bothered to learn), sitting in his chair, perfectly satisfied with a football game, a jar of dry-roasted peanuts, a glass of beer. How could anything possibly be better?