the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

to my father.

(Or to my mother, if she gets the message before it's erased.)

This story begins with my new toy, a Motoblur, which is a supercool androidish PDA.* It came in last Friday, and to say I've been busy lately would be like suggesting the pope is a mite religious. Thus it was that friends set up some cool applications for me.

* Personal Digital Assistant--not Public Display of Affection, which wouldn't make much sense here.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The problem here is not that I'm a technical moran,* but that I went from a simple cell phone I hardly ever used and even less frequently texted with, to a handheld touch-screen computer with more power and capability than the operating systems which filled entire rooms when I was still a wee lass. I can deal with computers. Really. I can. It's just that when you quasi-inherit a pre-configured computer with all sorts of texting, messaging, interneting, video-playing, picture-taking, and camcorder(ing) functions like this, you're already behind the learning curve. In retrospect, I should have slowly added applications over a period of time, as I needed or wanted them, and learned what they were for and how they functioned as I went.

* This is for my marine, just so he knows I'm thinking of him.

As it is, I have a phone where something completely unforeseen occasionally pops up, and I say, "Oh cool. That's neat. I wonder how to make it do that on purpose?"*

* Stole this line from Jeff W. :)

I didn't have much of a chance to use the phone until Tuesday, when I drove to Broomfield to start my school week (I live in a cell phone dead zone--we don't even have twilight here). For the last couple of days, I've been dinking about with the phone when I got a couple of minutes, trying to figure it out.

Now, skip to today's class. (Yeah yeah. I'll get back to the phone. Patience, people!) Today is British Literature, 1660-1900. We're working on Lyrical Ballads, by Wordsworth and Coleridge.

Random comment to Daddy--NO ONE ELSE READ THIS! You remember when I told you I didn't like "Tintern Abbey" and you said, "Give it twenty years and read it again. Your opinion will change"? You were right. It didn't take quite twenty years, though.

But I digress.* Our instructor, Sue, had asked us to suggest a few poems to discuss in detail in class. Based on a comment she'd made last week, I asked to discuss "The Nightingale," in addition to a couple of others that a friend had already asked for the previous week.

* Someday, when I write my memoir, I'll probably call it But I Digress.

I think I was the only "Nightingale" enthusiast in the group, but since I got my opinion in before anyone else, my suggestions were accepted. Thus, when we got around to this poem in class, Sue asked me to read it aloud.

Daddy tells a story, if you know him well enough for him to "brag," about some women who worked from him when he ran the college catering service at SFASU.* They were students who had to memorize or explicate a poem--I don't remember the details. They were reading it like...well, like most people read poetry. They were seduced into the rhythm and rhyme music of it and missed its meaning. He listened to them talk about it for a while, reading it aloud, then asked if he could take a look at it. Then he read it to them.

* Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches.

Daddy is a master of reading aloud. He loves literature and feels it, and you know this when you hear him read it. It's like listening to Beethoven play Chopsticks: no matter how complex or involved the literature, he makes it his. Thoughout my childhood, he would come into the kitchen when we were involved in mindless labor of some sort--washing dishes, shelling peas, canning, etc--pluck one of his old college textbooks off the shelf in the living room, then settle down at the kitchen table and read to us. He loved Mark Twain, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and various poems (like "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"). Sometimes, he'd share something fairly modern and humorous he'd just read; other times, something classical. It was a performance, effortless and beautiful.

So when he read to the women who worked for him, his delivery--his interpretation of the poem--was unexpected, to say the least. By the time he finished reading it, at least one of them was in tears.

I'm not that good.

I did, however, grow up listening to poetry being read like this. And from the time I was quite young (10 or 11?), I read to my parents (entire novels sometimes, over a period of days). Since then, I've read to friends when they'd let me, and quite often, to my students. Even when people initially tell me they think being read to is childish--which has happened a time or two--they invariably enjoy it. One of life's great pleasures is reading something you love aloud to an appreciative audience; another one of life's great pleasures is being in that audience.

So I read today. Several people complimented my reading. (I shan't deign to repeat what they said, because I don't remember the details and even if I did, there's no way to repeat compliments you've been given without coming across as vain.)

Back to the phone.

On my way through Denver tonight, I called a friend in Wyoming and talked for a while, then I thought I'd call Daddy to tell him about the poem reading and thank him for teaching me so well. I had earphones and a mouthpiece, so I was "hands free." By the time I tried to ring Mother and Daddy, I was south of Denver and finally moving at a respectable pace.

They weren't there. I got the answering machine, explained why I was calling and why I didn't have their cell numbers, then said goodbye.

My new toy, as I mentioned, has a touch screen. To keep you from beeping at people or disconnecting yourself or other such silliness when you speak on it, the phone goes blank when you place a call. When you end the call--provided the person you called hangs up--your screen lights up again, and you can disconnect the call on your end (or maybe it will disconnect itself in a second or two). When I called my friend in Wyoming, she hung up, so my screen lit up at the end of the call. Then I dialed my parents and got the answering machine...which, in the fashion of annoying machines, didn't divine that I was finished and thus, didn't automatically hang up when I said "goodbye."

I paused just a moment to find a way to turn the screen on, and in that moment, my truck wandered slightly into the next lane toward another car innocuously also headed south on I-25. I dropped the phone, as you might imagine, corrected my path (then corrected it again), and in the interim, I said some decidedly unpoetic things quite sharply.

Then I remembered I'd been trying to hang up the call. I said aloud, "I hope the call was ended," or something of that spirit.

Alas. No. At that point, I hung up.

My parents simply do not use such language. They are aware that I do, but I make it a point to avoid using such language with them because I know they don't like it (I do slip from time to time when I get emotional, admittedly). But for the most part, I make an effort to not offer offense.

Therefore, to whomever gets that message, I'm sorry for the vulgarity. Don't worry. I don't have Tourettes'. I just almost killed myself and some innocent commuter. Despite the fact that I almost sullied my front seat in that moment, I'm duly mortified at my outburst.

NOTE TO SELF: Just because a device is "hands free" does not make it safe to use while driving.

Also, of course, thank you, Daddy, for teaching me to read. :)

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