There I was, sitting at the computer having a video conference across Skype with a guy in Nicaragua. He’s the designer on the college magazine I edit, a former college professor who picked up and moved to Central America because the surfing’s good and it gets him farther away from me. We Skype a lot. If you don’t know, Skype isn’t a kind of fish, but a program that lets two people video chat across the Internet. It’s almost as good as being in the same room, only I can’t reach across the desk, grab his shirt and scream, “Where are my pages?” (I miss that part.) So there we were, chatting it up like I’ve done dozens of times before when the grandest of revelations occurred to me: “Holy time machines, I’m in the future!”
Pondering the loss of brain cells thanks to the Internet
The Internet is making me dumb. I be dumb thanks to the Internet. Damn, you, Internet, damn you! Not it fault, I know. We’re to blame really. The Internet is just a … well … what the heck is it? Microchips and wires? Bits and bytes? A fancy box with endless photos of dogs dressed like Darth Vader and generic Viagra ads? Truth is, the Internet is a vast catalog of searchable information, 98 percent of which will turn your brain softer than the carved pumpkin dissolving into a puddle of goop on my front porch.
Phone Calls from Mom and Raking Pine Needles
A student came racing into my opinion writing class out of breath, painfully late and apologizing profusely. He’s always late, but never apologizes like this. “This time I actually have a good excuse,” he told me, doubled-over and wheezing. (Most of the time it’s cigarettes or needing to feed his cat.) “My mother was yelling at me because I didn’t call home this week.” That WAS a good one — one of the best I had heard in an awful long time. Gotta’ call your mom, I told him. I didn’t have the heart to tell this poor college kid those phone calls never stop — and that they only get weirder as he gets older.
Every Moment Now Precious for a Dog with Cancer
This was supposed to be a very different column. One about how dogs mean so much to us. How those four-legged critters — with their dirty feet and ability to eat three-week-old shrimp shells, only to cough them up on the rug — can woo us over and become irreplaceable parts of our lives. And I guess it’s still about that. But it was supposed to be about my brother’s dog, Oreo — a member of his band of rabble-rousing K-9s that I call the “country cousins.” She was an old girl — 17, for goodness sake — and had been part of our family for so long that the loss was felt by all when her body gave out and she had to be put to sleep. Oreo was a big, dopey bear — you half expected to see her lugging around a honey pot and breaking into song. She had a permanent grin stretched across her face … like the one a child gets after walking into Disney World for the first time. It screamed, “WOWWWWW!” and Oreo would have that grin staring at a moth. She enjoyed life, even just sitting on the porch doing nothing, and there’s a lot to be said for that.