Technology for oldsters (who are NOT dummies)

 Last week I had to take my computer into a repair shop. I chose a local repairman with a good reputation. He turned out to be a young man, very casual and rather unkempt, as is the fashion among the young. The shop was in his garage. Even so, he seemed competent and I tend to be trusting. As it turned out, my trust was justified.

We first starting using a computer in the 1980s, while our kids were still living with us and we were serving the church in Bolivia. We had heard about personal computers and were attracted to the idea; much of my work on the field was in writing textbooks and taking council minutes as secretary. Hal spent a lot of time in class preparation. We figured a computer would help us.

While on a furlough back in Oregon, we approached our mission board with a request that they help us purchase a computer. Computers were even more expensive then than they are now. The board deliberated, then told us they had decided that personal computers were too experimental and probably a passing fad. If we wanted to purchase our own, they wouldn’t protest, but they certainly were not going to spend the offerings of the church on a whim.

We took a leap of faith and bought a Mac, at that time a big, heavy, grey, boxy machine, and a challenge to carry with us on the plane back to Bolivia. We learned how to use it with a little help from the handbook and a seminary course before we left for the field. We were total technological neophytes.

Of course it helped us, cutting our working time in half. (A few years later, the mission board began supplying computers for all their workers.) Since then, we’ve gone through quite a few computers and now we each own one. I depend on mine as I continue writing and editing.

But I have to admit that I don’t understand the inner workings or most of the surface applications. I tend to stick to what is helpful to me. And as the technology is advancing, I am definitely not keeping up. Is that due to age and resistance to change? I hope not, but maybe a little.

I’ve developed my own way of fixing small glitches, such as a frozen screen, or the appearance of little wavy lines running across my document. I shut down the computer, using the escape button if the machine is frozen; I then close the lid and pat the computer, saying comforting words like, “There. There. You’ll be fine. Just rest a while.” Then I leave it off overnight. In the morning all is well again.

Here in the retirement community, we have opportunities to grow technologically, with a dedicated computer room complete with tutorials. A staff technician comes to our apartments when we need help. The community website provides activity announcements, dinner menus, addresses of all residents, communications (including this blog), and much more. Free internet service is part of the deal.

Of course, not every resident here takes advantage of this. Many of the older members of the community don’t own a computer and are not in condition to adopt the leap into technology it would require. And some just stubbornly say, “No! I don’t need that!” But most of us are able to take at least minimal advantage of computers and other resources on the internet. The stereotype of the old person totally rejecting computer technology or too mentally diminished to use it is just not true of most of us. We’re not dim-witted. It makes me mad when I hear people give instructions like, “Just explain it like you would to your grandmother.” Or worse, “That’s so simple even my grandpa could get it.”

Stop it!

Most of us here are “life-long learners” (lovely phrase). We’re far from finished learning new skills and that includes technological skills.

Maybe someday I’ll get so feeble I’ll turn off my computer for good. But even then, I’ll probably want one of those machines that has a name and talks to me. I’ll ask it to read out loud Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Well, maybe not that one. How about Winnie the Pooh? Then I’ll ask it to sing me to sleep with a lullaby. And it will.

Good night.

Eight-year-old children and eighty-year-old children

 

I subscribe to a Frederick Buechner daily email quotation. The son-in-law of the late author manages the site, posting daily excerpts from Buechner’s many books. Buechner is one of my favorite writers. His insights can be both profound and funny at the same time, always well-written. I look forward to my daily connection with him. Today as I sat down to decide on the topic for my next weekly blog posting, I decided to read the Buechner quote-of-the-day first. The posting is entitled simply, “Old Age.” “How appropriate,” I said to myself. More of a short essay than a single quotation, Buechner writes of the similarities between eight-year-old children and 80-year-old children. It was originally published in the book Whistling in the Dark. I couldn’t have said any of this better than he did, so I decided to share the essay with you. “OLD AGE” by Frederick Buechner

“OLD AGE IS NOT, as the saying goes, for sissies. There are some lucky ones who little by little slow down to be sure, but otherwise go on to the end pretty much as usual. For the majority, however, it's like living in a house that's in increasing need of repairs. The plumbing doesn't work right anymore. There are bats in the attic. Cracked and dusty, the windows are hard to see through, and there's a lot of creaking and groaning in bad weather. The exterior could use a coat of paint. And so on. The odd thing is that the person living in the house may feel, humanly speaking, much as always. The eighty-year-old body can be in precarious shape, yet the spirit within as full of beans as ever. If that leads senior citizens to think of all the things they'd still love to do but can't anymore, it only makes things worse. But it needn't work that way. “Second childhood commonly means something to steer clear of, but it can also mean something else. It can mean that if your spirit is still more or less intact, one of the benefits of being an old crock is that you can enjoy again something of what it's like being a young squirt.  “Eight-year-olds, like eighty-year-olds, have lots of things they'd love to do but can't because they know they aren't up to them, so they learn to play instead. Eighty-year-olds might do well to take notice. They can play at being eighty-year-olds, for instance. Stiff knees and hearing aids, memory loss and poor eyesight are no fun, but there are those who marvelously survive them by somehow managing to see them as, among other things and in spite of all, a little funny.  “Another thing is that, if part of the pleasure of being a child the first time round is that you don't have to prove yourself yet, part of the pleasure of being a child the second time round is that you don't have to prove yourself any longer. You can be who you are and say what you feel, and let the chips fall where they may.  “Very young children and very old children also have in common the advantage of being able to sit on the sideline of things. While everybody else is in there jockeying for position and sweating it out, they can lean back, put their feet up, and like the octogenarian King Lear ‘pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies.’"  “Very young children and very old children also seem to be in touch with something that the rest of the pack has lost track of. There is something bright and still about them at their best, like the sun before breakfast. Both the old and the young get scared sometimes about what lies ahead of them, and with good reason, but you can't help feeling that whatever inner goldenness and peace they're in touch with will see them through in the end.”