This is my fourth laptop, my third brand-new one. I know that doesn't sound like much, but coming from a time when an electric typewriter given to me upon high school graduation was a bonanza envied by all my friends (literally all, but they had manual machines at least; it wasn't the completely Dark Ages), the fact that I'm on my fourth laptop is big news. The shine, the wonder of it! And it's all but empty, if you don't count all the documents I've already written that have been assiduously transferred here by my smarty-pants husband. He also wiped them off of my third, second-new laptop, and we donated that little number to the local CARDV. I hope those ladies find it helpful.
After college, I kept my globally-envied Smith Corona humming along through years of more college, as was often an English major's wont, back then. It could be packed into a hard case and was quite hefty. I spent many nights, living alone (the privilege accorded to undergrads who remain single after their roommates veer off into Pairs-Ville with their MRS degrees), snoring probably slightly louder than the machine's cozy hum, my cheek laid trustingly on the smooth, warm roofy thing over the letter-striker things (I know there's accurate terminology for all this, but I'm no longer retaining it). I never saw these naps coming, back in the days when I only suspected I might be narcoleptic, but Smith Corona, an accommodating if metallic pillow, was always there for me whenever I toppled. What if any damage the constant reverberation did to my brain remains uncharted, but let's say if it did rattle my jelly, that explains a lot.
After I moved to Pairs-ville, I bought a Brothers electronic machine to carry me through what I believed would be the last of my college years. This model was bigger in area and all tricked out with the latest advances: auto-correct and one line memory! All I had to do was buy correction tape reels for it, and it did the rest of the work that formerly cost me reams of paper ripped out of the machine and wadded tightly for more vehement tossing across the room. Because in those days, children, if you typed the wrong letter, there wasn't much else to do about it but start all over. First came the correct tape, and then the machines like my Brothers, which ran the tape in front of the typo for me. Magic and Paradise!
Once I left academia behind (The Ivory Tower portion of it, at least) I thought I'd do something really cool and buy a tiny electronic machine, like a laptop without a cover and a display screen that showed four lines of type in a window above the keyboard. It was light as a feather, and, it turned out, only good for lightweight work. You couldn't see what you typed, for one thing, or only four lines of it at best. Thankfully, I began bearing children soon after this dubious upgrade to the latest technology, so the only writing I did for years consisted of lists. Endlessly, unfinished, undispatched lists for shopping, chores, and even for books I planned to read, which occupied a much longer list than the one containing the books I actually read.
When I started typing again, first with a fiction writing course I took at free university, I had no typewriter, so I used our family's first gigantic desktop computer (after everyone else abandoned the fight to occupy it and went to bed, of course). Predictably, almost stereotypically, the blasted thing lost my entire final draft exactly when I was about to type "The End."
Thus began another long hiatus in typing. I went back to journaling in bed, the only place I had privacy, after weaning and potty training my brood, but found it not quite so comfortable when I nodded off with my neck bent double and my pens leaking all over my pillows.
By the time laptops became not such a big deal--I mean some people had them, and I had a husband who loves supplying his family with techno gadgets--he bought me a refurbished Dell laptop. It weighed in at about 15 pounds at five inches thick, but with it I could sit at a corner table in the kitchen and look around online, or instant message those sufficiently in the know to write me back. Halcyon days.
Before long I had an actual writing job, some of which needed to be performed at home. I was finally qualified to own a new laptop! I still recall the heady feeling of opening the box to unpack a pristine, thin, and seemingly featherweight device, direct from Taiwan and untouched by podgy Caucasian hands. On this machine, at a table in my bedroom, I created weekly columns and features for a local paper. I felt I'd entered the Promised Land.
But the Promised Land before too long came up against a snag called the Internet, and gutted its newsroom like many other papers around the country. Laptops had then shrunk to netbooks, and I found them irresistibly cute, so, although I was no longer writing at my day job, my gadget-shopping husband granted my wish to adopt a little netty. He wiped my first new laptop and we gave it to a struggling poet of my acquaintance whose old machine had truly expired. With the purchase of my tiny, near-weightless netbook, I felt I'd come full circle, to possessing a writing machine so dainty, so adorable, so cleanly transportable in one hand--it was a dream come true. The problem was my arthritis made its presence known at the same time, and the tiny dancer's minuscule keyboard was within a couple of years all but inaccessible to the gnarly claw-hammer hands I had aged into.
This brand-new laptop under my fingertips is both large and light. The screen is great for streaming, the keyboard is wide, whisper quiet, and attentive to gentle keystrokes--something my swollen knuckles like a lot. I suppose I should know what kind it is, beyond what the "hp" logo tells me, but I'm not the kind of girl who memorizes specs of that kind. It's pretty, it does what I say (A little while ago, I said, "Blog." See?), and I'm keeping it close by, a little buddy that just might escort me all the way into my dotage. Whether I'm awake for that or not.
