My son and his wife gave me a cool birthday present last year. It’s a subscription to a memoir writing company, and it sends me a new question to respond to each week. One of them recently stumped me for a couple weeks. The question was: “What are your favorite possessions? Why?”
I’m not a big possessions guy; so I had to think about that quite a while. What I finally decided is that my favorite things are my computer, iPad, and phone. That will sound very quaint to future generations I’m sure, and I know there are lots of negatives that come with too much screen time. I spend too much time on Facebook and trying to figure out Wordle, but at least for me the positives outweigh the negatives.
I can’t imagine what amazing technological gadgets will be in use 20 or 30 years from now. We certainly had no idea in the year 2000 that we would have a pretty good camera in our pockets at all times and all the information in the world at our fingertips that we have in 2025.
When I was a kid we had a World Book encyclopedia at our house. It was probably 15 or 20 volumes of maybe 200-300 pages each, and if what we wanted to know wasn’t in those very limited number of pages we had to take a trip to the local library to do more research. Remember card catalogs?
I have always been a book lover and a few years ago books would have been my answer to this question about favorite possessions. But today I have a whole library of books on my iPad and access through the internet to almost any information I want. Sure, some of it isn’t accurate, but that is true in books too.
And what my computer and iPad also let me do is write my own blog, sermons, prayers, letters to the editor and to my congressional reps. I can journal or write anywhere in the world I happen to be with those devices. I can stay in touch with family and friends, read books, listen to audio books, watch sporting events, movies, play games, and get news and sports scores wherever I am.
Ok, that sounds too much like an Apple commercial I know. (And for future generations, if any read this, Apple is a tech company, not to be confused with the fruit of the same name. If you want to know how it got that name you can research it on whatever devices you are using now.)
I will finish this entry with a somewhat related story. In the early 1990’s I was writing my doctoral dissertation on the very first computer I ever owned. I was so grateful for that machine because it was so much easier to write, revise, edit, and correct what I had written than in the previous generation that included typewriters, carbon paper, correction fluid, and a lot of cutting and pasting pages together to write school papers or a 200 page dissertation.
But the computer was such a new thing then I didn’t fully trust it not to lose what I had worked so hard to create; so backed up my work at the end of every day on two square plastic things we called floppy disks, even though they weren’t floppy. And for safe keeping I left one of those disks at my university office, and carried the other with me home in my brief case.
Yes, I was a little compulsive, but you need to understand that I was working three part-time jobs while working on the dissertation whenever I could. So it took me 3 years to finish the darn thing, and I sure didn’t want to lose it or have the computer eat it. So here’s the punch line to this too-long story — I was at home alone one day in our parsonage in Sparta, Ohio when a really scary storm blew in. I don’t always head for shelter when it storms, but that day the wind sounded very serious; so I decided to go to the basement. I only took two things with me – our dog Cinnamon, and the floppy disk that contained my dissertation.
Today, because electronic devices have gotten so much smaller and are easily portable I could simply take my laptop, iPad, and phone with me, and instead of floppy disks that weren’t floppy today we can save things on the “cloud,” which isn’t really a cloud either.
No wonder we can’t communicate?
June 25, 2025
Peacefully Harsh 