Diving down

Going away on a great vacation or a long trip can be like diving deep underwater. Everything above the surface fades away. Nothing can reach you. You are in a different world. You don’t resurface until you come back home.

I began a very long dive after the July 4 party celebrating my independence from gainful employment. Yesterday on the drive home from a sweet family gathering 750 miles away, I kept adding to the preparation list for the Congo trip, which begins in three days, as I watched the sun go down. We had stayed till past noon at sister Sylvia’s, reluctant to leave the sisters and brothers-in-law we see at most once a year because we are scattered coast to coast.

Vic and I enjoyed the silence and he drove like a robot because we decided after a few hours to go all the way home rather than stopping off. We talked about family history. I reviewed the names of his cousins and their spouses, whom I have met over the years but I lose the connections so easily. They were all there, the cousins from his father’s side, a real coup for the organizers, who were as proud of getting the whole family together as my mother would have been. A number of their children and grandchildren showed up, too.

I think I have remained unnecessarily confused about his paternal cousins because there are so many maternal ones. Vic’s mother’s family was large. His father’s family was smaller, just the three sons and a sister who was single and died young. Arthur, Chester, Leidy, and Edith. Each of the sons had a farm. Each of the sons had children and they were all there, at cousin Lois and Frieda’s farmhouse for lunch and the afternoon, and later at cousin David’s house.

Lois and Frieda's farmhouse

Frieda in the pink skirt, Lois in the orange blouse

Lois and Frieda’s 1760 farmhouse stands on the land that belonged to their father, Arthur. They rent out the land and haymaking was going on as we gathered. Leidy, the youngest son and my husband’s father, got the family farm a few miles away. How did that happen? And why did he sell it in the 1960s rather than rent out the land? We discussed those things. Not all the answers are clear. Does it matter?

Obviously, other things mattered more to Vic’s parents than hanging on to the family farm. Economic survival, for one. It is hard to know what will matter to you as you grow older, or what will matter to your children. 

Video games matter, but so do wagon rides

Cousin Lois has researched ancestors back to the 16th century. Chris and Bethany review the history.

Our children, who were present at this gathering only briefly through FaceTime, always loved going to Lois and Frieda’s farmhouse, with its foot-thick walls and whiff of old age and sweeping vista down to the creek. Joanna would love to have a place like that. The house where her father grew up has been renovated by its current owner into a magazine-worthy modern version of its authentic self. None of us could afford to buy it if it were for sale. The owner has graciously given us tours.

The to-do list for Congo gets longer, then shorter as I tick things off, then longer again. This time I may be incommunicado for most of the time that I am there. The electronic connections will be extremely uncertain so I will dive deeper than usual. I will resurface after August 1.

Can you pray with an iPad?

what I would be looking at if I wasn't looking at my virtual keyboard

This is not a product endorsement. Still, I was delighted when Vic asked me whether I might like an iPad as a retirement gift. A sleek little bit of compact technology that I could carry with me to Congo. Remember when laptops were the ultimate in portability? I did carry my beloved MacBook Pro on the last trip, and used it a lot. But it stayed in whatever home I was staying in. An iPad would stay in my purse. But would an iPad do what I needed it to do?

I need a writing machine, or what I learned to call, to my amusement, in 1981, a word processor. Since that green-screened Wang in George McCoy's office in downtown Chicago, where I fat-fingered letters that I mailed to the members of the organization I was helping George run, an antinuclear business group, technology has come a long, long way. A year later I was helping the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists into the new era by urging the editor to splurge on a little box called an Apple Macintosh. As soon as page layout software came up to speed we began putting the magazine together in Qark Express. (It is indicative of what ancient history this is to note that this iPad's officious correction system did not helpfully substitute "quark" for "quark" as I was typing. It does not recognize its own history.)

So I am no technophobe. Still I have been slow to enter the era of mini i-this and i-that for two reasons. 1) They are too tiny for my aging eyesight. I don't like to wear reading glasses all the time. 2) They are not really geared to writing. Texting with your thumbs is not writing. Writing is touch typing without looking at the screen. Writing is letting your ideas flow out through your fingers without having to think about it. Writing is going on and on at length and getting your creative juices flowing and then going back and editing afterward or starting somewhere altogether new.

And for me, writing can be a form of prayer. It directs my thoughts deeper and broader to things I didn't know before I started writing. This means that I have to write without being aware of technology, of how the machine or the pen or paper are helping me or not helping me. These are supposed to be neutral tools, extensions of my own physical self. Above all, I should not have to think about them.

So here I am, nearly four decades after that clumsy "word processor," still, or once again, fat-fingering words awkwardly on a screen. This time I can't even feel the keyboard, so I have to keep looking at it, bowing my head to the technology rather than gazing out at the trees that surround me. And I am writing about the technology rather than whatever deep spiritual thoughts I might otherwise have.

I can hear the techy males in my family say, just buy a separate keyboard, which I may do, but I am resisting for two reasons. 1) I want to travel light. Maybe I will use this little rectangle also as my camera, also as my ebook device. 2) I want to see if I can totally adapt to this new technology. If they put a keyboard on the screen you should be able to write with it, right?

My hands are threatening to cramp up from fitting themselves to to a 9-inch virtual keyboard and my shoulders are tense. But I am doing. Enter than yesterday. No, no iPad. I meant, I am doing better than yesterday. Sheesh.