What Took Me So Long?

My youngest daughter Kelly at the age thirteen, was really doing well at school especially in her computer class so I agreed to purchase a small Apple computer. At that time you could use a small  TV for your monitor and considering I would be killing two birds with one stone, a computer for her room and a television for her room, why not! 

It was just Kelly and myself living in the home now with an unused bedroom. I was divorced and my two older children had graduated school and moved out starting their own lives. Kelly was having some minor  problems as teenagers often do and having her interested in an educational activity was a good thing. She also was playing an instrument in a band at her school, raising and showing Lop-eared rabbits, taking roller-skating lessons with me and hitting all the antique shops also with me, learning about old and sometimes priceless pieces. 

I built two very long and big rabbit cages plus large wooden boxes. I figured if one is going to keep a rabbit that loves hopping about in the woods they should at least have plenty of room to move around in. I believe it’s cruel the way people keep rabbits in little cages and have no business owning any pets! Kelly and I went to several nearby towns buying special breeds of rabbits. One breed was the Lop Eared rabbit and another was the Angora. I went with her to the fairs in town when she was showing her rabbits. One of her rabbits got first place, a blue ribbon, and her picture taken holding her rabbit. It ended up on the front page of our small town newspaper, very small town, which would explain the front page thing.

I did not get involved with her and her computer, that was hers and hers alone. In those days there was no reason for the computer to be set up in a family safe area because nothing was online that parents had to fear.

Looking back, oh how I wish I had gotten involved with her computer activities and had her show me what it was all about. She was able to find jobs quickly because of her computer knowledge after she got out of school.

I had helped her buy a home and then had a smaller place built right behind her house that I would live in. While she worked I watched her two girls, my grandbabies, and enjoyed landscaping our combined yards, making water gardens, arbors, and a big vegetable garden.

She had one room she used as an office, library, and her computer, there it was all the time and I never even looked at it,  nor did I care too.

 After a couple of years passed my arthritis took over my whole body. Kelly and the girls and I left Texas and moved to New England. I moved into a senior citizen apartment complex and found my life had no eventful meaning to it. No grandchildren to watch, no gardening, nothing but pain, loneliness, and more pain.

I watched a lot of TV and started to notice that after a show  was over they would announce that we could learn more about this product or that story on www.CBS.com or if the station was NBC the same announcement was made. Also there would be a www. something for a certain product that was being talked about, or a www.something after a commercial if you wanted to know more about the product or wanted to order the thing. I got more and more curious about the computer world. 

One day when I was in the lounge of the center building where the seniors’ activities were held, a couple of ladies were sitting there talking and one was saying to the other that her son never came to take her shopping when he had said he would. I suggested she might do some of her shopping on the computer since she didn’t drive and was unable to get out on her own. They both looked at me and asked, what is a computer?”

That evening I called up my daughter Kelly and asked her to help me purchase a computer and spend a day with me teaching me how to use it. She was shocked, after all these years being around one and never having the slightest interest in learning how to use it, why now ?

I explained to her that the way my rheumatoid arthritis is moving in on me so fast, and I can see my hands and feet starting to cripple up, I will some day be very limited in my ability to drive and even take care of my own needs. I should really buy one now and get myself educated in the computer world. She said she had a cheap one that was called Barbie that wasn’t being used and I can have it. I was delighted as I felt if I couldn’t get the hang of it I would have wasted my money.

I was fifty nine when I got my first computer and  now years later I could not live without it. Not only do I do all my shopping online for food, clothes, yard supplies and you name it, I have three websites and the rest is history, I could not live without it.

Author Eileen Clark

Image: middleweb.com