Confessions of a Luddite

I write this as my husband Jeff yells into whatever kind of device he now has (that’s how out of tune to devices I am) to AT&T asking for a copy of his bill. The person on the other end from a faraway land asks for passwords which he doesn't know. Aren't there little pocket phone directories for that now?

I myself have encountered nightmares trying to reach a live Comcast employee. Shamelessly, I have accidentally found out that one will come on the line if I resort to getting really mad and even using curse words. Yes, I got really mad and sometimes cursed like a sailor. Remember, I'm the resident shock jock of art and writing. Sometimes the phone recording will even say, "I see you're getting mad!" I press operator # * # * and my blood pressure goes up and up!

My paternal grandmother, the Queen Victoria-like Julia Fowler Bounds, could not figure out how to work a ballpoint pen once, much to the amusement of my own mother Marguerite Bounds, known to all in Milton as "A Schoool Teacher," as she pronounced it. I must admit that I had similar problems with a gel pen I purchased at the Dollar Store in Milton. I was going to use it to write this column. (No, I don't type.) You just had to pull the cap off (it was stuck on really hard) instead of pushing it down, but Jeff and I couldn't figure it out all evening. Finally, I went back to the store and an employee well over 65 pulled it right off and looked at me like my mother looked at Julia Bounds.

Speaking of typing, my practical father Jim Bounds wanted me to take typing in high school, just like he wanted me to attend church and I know he secretly wanted me to be good at sports. He loved me anyway in spite of all these shortcomings, but I flunked typing, algebra and gym. Now my long-suffering husband Jeff types these columns on The Laptop despite my indecipherable handwriting which he has slowly learned to decode because I pay him a $10 fee for each article.

I was given a car (to get me to my teaching job) by my mother. It sat in the driveway until I finally, desperately knew I had to fly the matriarch-ruled nest in Milton and move to Rehoboth Avenue. My mother kept saying, not reassuringly, "I hope you'll pass the driving test over at motor vehicle." She went on a short trip, and a kindly, soothing Milton friend of hers and mine, Gladys Brittingham, said, "We're going over there to motor vehicle right now and you'll pass with flying colors!" I passed and felt more proud than when I graduated from college! It was the last time I parallel parked, however.

I attended nursing school right after college, a futile attempt to avoid teaching school. I don't know where I ever got the idea I would be good at that, being a Luddite and not particularly empathetic. Perhaps I should provide a short definition of Luddite at this time: "a person opposed to technological change," according to Webster's New World Dictionary.

To get back to nursing school – I had always been a curandero (Latin for healer) in college. Girls would knock on my dorm-room door for me to diagnose their symptoms. I later moved off campus to the El Fidel Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, which still had bullet holes in the lobby from Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, to avoid having to be interrupted by girls wanting my medical knowledge. They even asked me to be in their sorority for my usefulness, but being a Luddite and not being a joiner, I declined. I quit nursing school after six months when the algebra of drugs and solutions got too close to chemistry, and practicing sticking needles into oranges got too intimidating.

I only have a Jitterbug (now named Lively, or "are you still alive?") flip phone which I can barely operate. Two messages have been stuck in there since mid-April and I can't get rid of them. Even Jeff can't delete them. Please don't call me on it!! Its belly button still glows red with admonishment, but it's one of many red lights glowing on the nightstand, green and blue ones, too, that light up the night like a miniature aurora borealis.

There is a worse impediment for me, however, when I want to or need to go to downtown Rehoboth in “the season." The wretched parking meters, of course! Walk up and down the avenue looking for their Mother House to deposit coins if you're really a dinosaur like me, or use a credit card. I usually have to beg a passerby to help me, or even offer them some quarters for stopping to help. Now I just pay the long-suffering Jeff another $10 to drive me in, or offer him what I call the Plowman's Lunch at McDonald’s or Casapulla's for "driving Ms. Crazy."

Sometime along in the digital age, the world will be populated by alien-looking creatures long deformed by looking at their devices, with bent and elongated necks, big eyes, long, narrow fingers and no ears. In the future, after the digital age has "undigitalized" itself with its complexity, the next Big War will be fought with sticks and stones.