Marian Ronan

Checking Back In

So here’s why you haven’t heard from me in a while: my PC crashed.

I have had a personal computer of some kind since 1984 when I got a Kaypro. Most people have never heard of a Kaypro. It was a little desktop whose keyboard strapped right onto the screen on the front of the engine. I was in love with it from the day I brought it home. This was so, in large part, because in the Philadelphia Catholic high schools of the 1960s, you either had to take secretarial or academic courses, as if, somehow, those of us going to college weren’t going to need to type. Our secretaries would do it for us, maybe? Actually, they just had too many girls and not enough nuns, so we had to choose. And clearly, I didn’t have the temperament to be anybody’s secretary. As a result, for many years everything I typed looked like hell, not to put too fine a point on it. I would never have graduated from college except for erasable paper.

Until Kaypro, and, in particular, its spellcheck program came along. The rest was history. But then I bought a PC with Windows Vista on it three years or so ago, when history slowed down considerably, and  finally ground to a halt. The dreadful thing started crashing. You could start it up again, but then twenty minutes later it would shut down all over. Black screen. Very bad.

Except it really wasn’t bad, it was wonderful, because I was so thoroughly annoyed with Microsoft that I went and bought an Apple Imac. [You may be quite sure they aren’t paying me to write this; more’s the pity.] My eighty-nine year old friend Mary Louise had raved to me about her Imac, and she was right: it’s about the most wonderful thing I’ve ever encountered, excepting my husband, who was lovely enough to encourage me to spend  TWICE AS MUCH MONEY as I did on the PC and just get it and stop cursing.  I also bought the One to One package, which means, amazingly enough, that for a year I can go get an unlimited number of free private fifty-minute lesson on how to use my lovely new prize. At the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue you can get lessons 24 hours a day, though I must say, my husband is less unenthusiastic about my going at 3 AM, when the largest number of slots are available, than he was about my buying the Imac in the first place.

But this trading up has been taking some time, as you can well imagine, so you haven’t heard much from me. But you’re going to now, I promise you. Because I am writing up a storm on my gorgeous new computer.