And That's When She Started Cussing

It's not like she's old. At 55 she has proven to be perfectly capable of lots of things. She's got a Master's degree, for Christ’s sake. She has been a leader in her field, raised amazing children, volunteered in her community.  

She never used to cuss. She used to laugh at herself when her kids had to help her download an app or figure out how to use her car navigator. It was, after all, supposed to be helping her. Her students began to say she had an "Amish Vortex" because devices did weird things around her.  

After years of calling high tech "just a phase," she settled into accepting some of the basics that seemed to be an inevitable part of her life: the phone, the laptop, and, begrudgingly, the car. She decided that mirroring the actions of others was the way to go, so she got the same phone as her son, the same laptop as her daughter, and the same car as her sisters. This way, she reasoned, she would be able to ask questions regularly and appear to know what was going on. 

If there were a narrator in her life, it would interject that she did not, in fact, know what was going on. 

Part of it was a lack of trust that began with back up cameras in her car. She still craned her neck to look behind her, loudly proclaiming to anyone in the car that she just didn't think those cameras knew what was back there.  

Her kids, in an effort to make things more convenient for her, got her an Amazon Echo Dot. It remained in its package for more than a year. She was afraid she would lose the cord or not understand how to set it up or, worse, not know what to say to it when she tried this new friendship out. She eventually gave it away and felt relieved that she could rest in the ways of the past. Lately, though, the recipient of the Echo posts online about it reading her books while she cooks and connecting to her family while she cleans and, suddenly, regret settles in and she discovers another part of modern culture: FOMO. 

She looks in the mirror to assess her "hipness," laughing as the irony of using an out-of-date word for this assessment. It's not like she wears slacks instead of pants or that she has a wide variety of badge holders for work that match her outfits. She's hip, dammit. She has a pixie cut and browses bohemian thrift stores and has traveled to over a dozen countries. She loves live music and eating food from other cultures and she even attended the first Women's March in D.C., so why was she so reluctant to learn technology? 

It became her embarrassing little secret, like admitting she didn't like chicken or Carol King. She perfected the look of confidence when she attended trainings at work, nodding along like she understood. She would gather in the restrooms and try to overhear others who were struggling so she could commiserate with them and validate her own suspicions of "this is just one more thing they are introducing that we won't be able to use." 

Much to the surprise of everyone, she still hadn't owned a computer at her age. Her work provided a laptop for her and she justified that one device was enough, although nearly half of the sites she wanted to check out were blocked. That's when the cussing started. 

It's not like she was looking up porn, for Christ's sake. She just wanted to try to set up a LinkedIn account, as she had heard that it was a good way to network. Blocked.  

"Fuck" 

She went straight for the big one. She clasped her hand over her mouth, surprised it had come out. Why on earth would Linked In be blocked. It was clearly the universe telling her that the risk of learning something new was not going to be rewarded today. It validated her fears and she retreated back to her theories of suspicion about the internet and these "new-fangled" devices. She laughed at herself again that she used that phase. It fit the mental age she felt right now. Maybe slacks were in the picture after all. 

As new options entered her world, she was both intrigued and overwhelmed. Netflix had so many options, her car navigation system startled her every time it spoke, the diet apps she considered seemed too complicated, and she began to realize that all these things she had considered optional were beginning to be necessities. She had ignored months of updates on her phone and maxed out her memory with screenshots that she took because she didn’t know what else to do with them. They were the closest thing to her memory now, reminding her to look up potential sites later, when she felt confident. That was getting more and more rare.  

She had always joked about her technological incompetence to her closest friends. Much like her “I don’t need no man” speech, she had reminded them that she didn’t need her phone to remember the numbers for her, she had done it for years and could continue to manage. She didn’t need templates to tell her how to write, she just used Word and hoped for the best without any of those complicated restraints. She told them she still preferred pulling into a gas station and asking for directions, that people were losing those connections amid all this technology. 

She shared things on Facebook, but rarely posted. She slowly texted her family, but when she Facetimed, she yelled at a decibel that could probably have been heard without the phone. She just didn’t trust it all.  

The day is one that is cemented in her mind. Her mother had just been diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia. She and her sister stayed on the phone for hours talking about what they had read, what behavioral changes they had noticed, how they would make a plan. They considered all the “what ifs.” Would she hurt herself? Would she hurt their dad? Would she live to see the grandkids get married? Should they humor her or correct her when she hallucinates?  

To help her mom to continue to recognize familiar faces, her sister suggested they create a photo guide that could be used for brain exercises. She imagined cutting out old photos and putting them in an old-fashioned photo album with hand-written notes beside them. Her daughter sighed, as she often did. 

“Mom, it’s all done digitally now,” she said. 

This terrified her. How could she trust someone else with something as sacred as her pictures? How could she get the pictures into the computer? How could she make sure it was done right? What if they were lost forever? 

Her daughter explained the Walgreen’s App, how her phone could take pictures of the old pictures and submit them without any of the pictures leaving the house.  

“But what if I do it wrong?” she said. Her daughter sat beside her, crisscross applesauce style, and agreed to help. 

She had always kept her pictures near the door in case of a fire. She had hundreds of them because, even when she used an old-fashioned camera, she had trust issues with it, so she always got doubles.   

She had always intended to sort the pictures into some sort of system, but it too seemed beyond overwhelming. Now there were too many to count and she needed to narrow down the best ones for her mom’s new digital resource. She had never been able to do this for herself, but for her mom, she took a deep breath and started a process long overdue. 

Her daughter showed her how to download the App. She was impatient and forgot her password and nearly gave up, except she saw a photo of her and her sister that her mom always loved, so she started again. Her daughter watched as she made piles of photos on the floor, shooing the dog away and occasionally stopping everything to share a story captured in a particular photo. 

Photos are nostalgic by nature, but knowing her mom may not remember many of the adventures in them added an extra note of melancholy. She began to snap pictures of her old pictures, but they had glares and the wrong angles and her damn hand kept shaking. Again, she nearly gave up. It was all too much. Too much to process all the endings the diagnosis represented. Too much to try to trust a new system amid the emotional turmoil of honoring the past.   

Her daughter offered to help take the pictures. Her mom’s fear was palpable, and her assistance might help her get over the hump of paralysis.  For hours, the two sat together sorting, snapping pictures, and reminiscing about a life well lived. Her daughter wanted to empower her mom by letting her upload the pictures to the app. It was a long process, but the ‘digital fairies’ as her mom called them, had successfully delivered them to a clerk across town and, in a matter of hours, they would be printed in a book that looked just like a store-bought one.   

She started cleaning up the piles of pictures, exhausted from both the process of making the book and the emotional toll of reliving the memories. She had bit the bullet. She had actually successfully used an actual app. Her fingers sent all those pictures to Walgreens.  The risk she took to face her fears for her mom were finally being rewarded. She sat in her state of anxiety and exhilaration and had but one word to say. 

“Fuck”