Luddite Love
By Wickham Boyle
I am the ultimate Luddite; I love everything tactile, analog, old-fashioned, old timey. I love ticking-pendulum clocks, fountain pens, high-rag paper, candles, chamber music. I love to make things, do things: pottery, dinners, knit sweaters, refinish furniture. I must have a 19th-century person living inside of me, albeit one who likes central heating, a steaming shower, a fast car.
There was never much hope for me to make an easy transition into the digital age. I had been an executive with a secretary who typed or word-processed everything I wrote with pen and paper. Who needed to learn computer? I loved books, and my anti-tech rant was that I didn’t want to contribute to the extinction of books by embracing new-fangled electronic gadgets designed to replace libraries and words on paper. Okay, we can begin to see I was deeply entrenched, believing technology would be a passing obsession and I, clinging to my old ways, would look wise for my tenacity.
Other less staunch Luddites would topple, but not I. Ha!. As a hedge to this fantasy, I did, however, invest heavily in a house computer for anyone who cared to use it.
In the late ’80s my then very young daughter wanted to help me with the damn thing, but she told me: “Mama, you have bad attitude. And I am not going to help you unless you get a better grip on yourself.” I wondered where she had heard those words. And so I blundered along, losing work that was eaten by the cannibalistic machine, and ever and again returning to my yellow pads and leaky pens.
Finally, when my husband’s career took off, I quit my day job. He invited me to follow my dream of being a writer, with one caveat: I had to learn to really use the computer. He was not going to type my work, and I wasn’t to inveigle my old secretary, or my best friend from college, or any of the other Luddite enablers who populated my last-century world.
I agreed, and threw myself at my daughter’s feet. See, she comprehends my dyslexia and I can be incompetent with her. After all, I taught her to speak, walk, swim, and keep clean; she owed me. So every night, little by little, with my fierce impatience mostly in check, my girl walked me through the basics of my little blue Apple computer. She led me to the joys of e-mail, quick edits, video-phones, scanners, digital photos. And although I remain some distance from being totally competent, I do have moments that leave me in technology’s glow.
She just sent me a message this morning between her classes at Columbia and her flight to the boyfriend in San Francisco; how fast they grow up. It read: ”Hey, techno-wizard Mama, how’s it goin’?” I started typing back, letter by letter, when my 17-year-old son walked in. ‘Ma, what are you doing – typing a letter?”
Feeling cool, I quipped: “No, I am texting.”
“Not like that, Ma. You have to go into the program on your phone that lets you hit a button and a choice of words comes up. Here, look, ’cause I am only going to show you once.” I wanted to say, suppose I said that to you, you big lug, you wouldn’t be dressed right now. But I held my tongue so I could get the techno goodies.
The next time a message comes for my husband, the self-professed geek of the family, and he hunts and pecks to return it, I will take the tech initiative and graciously bestow the shortcut. He is impressed whenever I figure out a new machine, reboot my computer, switch modes, or . . . okay, they are all impressed if I do any modern thing with aplomb.
And yet, it doesn’t mean I don’t relish an evening of candlelight and cello playing with a bottle of pre-techno wine at my feet. I am smitten with the old ways. Still, I crave the speed, connectivity, and graceless efficiency of this new era; that is until the hard drive dies or the extensive phone memory fails because it fell in a puddle. Then I am overjoyed with my paper phone book that I’ve kept for years with pens of many colors.
Wait, I have a text coming in; it’s my daughter. I can tell because I programmed my phone to play the theme from Charlie’s Angels whenever she calls. Ahhhh, technology.
