When the first television came into our family home it looked like the pictures I’ve seen of early radios. It was a piece of furniture in a cabinet with doors that opened and closed. I maintained that ability to close off the screens of all my televisions till rather recently. Like my mother, I wanted the screen to be able to be the focus of the living room sometimes, but to have times when it didn’t have to be.
Growing up, the first telephone upgrade was a “princess” phone that didn’t take up much space on the bedside table. Whenever you called the phone company for any reason they tried to sell you one in every color for every room, which didn’t happen for our house. When I got my first portable phone, I was a professional. It was built into my car. Several of us therapists at the clinic got our car phones and phone numbers at the same time so the numbers were in sequence. The computer I used for my dissertation took up a whole room while my first personal computer was luggable, like a small suitcase that I took as a carryon when I traveled.
The biggest change technology brought to my life and the lives of many people of my generation was the internet, though I remember a vacation in northern California in the early 90s, where my husband and I discussed how we couldn’t see how anyone could make money on the Internet. As a writer, I’m still in amazement and disbelief about the amount of time it took to research any topic using the library card catalog system compared to the instantaneous offhanded way we “just Google it.”
So we struggle to integrate new technologies into our lives without suffering too much disruption of what’s familiar. Yet, now the speed of changing technology is making familiarity obsolete. Someone told me the other day they didn’t want to do Facebook anymore because it changed so rapidly one had to be constantly unlearning and learning new skills in order to use it. Most everyday I’m learning something new about technology, and often grumbling about how it changes. But the other day, my lessons turned out to be ones of genuine delight.
“When did you remember having it last,” my husband asked. I’d been searching the house for my iPad for several days since we’d returned from our holiday trip. I reminded him that we’d had it on the plane when he tried to use it to get me connected to view an in-flight movie. We had given up the effort and used my phone instead. The empty, anxious sensations I was carrying in my belly weren’t just for the loss of the device, but for the Kindle library of books I’d purchased in recent years.
Though he constantly denies it, my husband is much more astute about technology than I am. He began searching my phone for an app to locate the iPad, something I couldn’t believe possible. Sure enough, there is such an app and it was telling us that my iPad was in Wilkinsburg, about 10 miles away on the other side of the river from where we live. I hadn’t been to Wilkinsburg recently and didn’t know anyone who lived there, so I was totally befuddled.
I felt eager yet too scared to follow the app’s directions by myself so that sunny Saturday afternoon my husband agreed to go with me. We set out on an adventure to solve the mystery with the help of our technology.
The app took us to a particular street, then to a particular house. While we stood in front of the house trying to decide if we should ring the bell, the needle began pointing to the duplex across the street from where we were standing. We searched the front yard of the second house hoping to avoid having to ring one of the doorbells to ask about the ipad. It took a few minutes but I determined, we’ve come this far. I climbed a couple of stairs and ring a bell.
An elderly woman came to the door, apologized for not inviting us in as she leaned backwards to restrict her dog. Her expression was one of welcomed relief. “I have it inside,” she said smiling, and she left the door for a few moments to retrieve it. She brought it outside, wrapped in several layers of protective plastic bags and handed it to me. I asked her name and she told me, “Rosemary. “I’m 73. I don’t have any use for it. I didn’t know if it was a computer or what but I worried how I could get it to its owner.” I asked where she found it and she said, on a bench at the bus stop at the airport. She asked the bus people if they would take it but they refused. When she said she travels by bus to and from her work at the airport where she cleans planes, the blank spaces in the ipad’s journey began to clear up.
She thanked us for coming to get it. “It would have stayed in my china cupboard for years,” she said. Reluctant at first, she finally agreed to allow us to express our gratitude by accepting the money my husband offered her. We hugged one another, as though we were all members of the same family, and I guess we were, brought together in a surprising way, by our GPS technology.
