Supergram

My children’s paternal grandmother, otherwise known as Gram, got her first computer, I believe, at the age of 73. It was a Mac, and she used it to send e-mail to us as well as keep her books and write checks in Quicken. During a visit to New Jersey, where she had lived for many years, I sat with her and taught her the skills that many of us younger folks don’t remember learning at all: how to point and click, how to click and drag, how to hold down the command key while typing another key, and on and on.

One of my children’s preschool teachers was a woman who’d had a stroke while in her thirties. I remember the stories she told me of learning how to walk and talk and eat again. How she was conscious, unlike the first time she’d learned those things, and how it made her all the more amazed by babies and what they learned to do.

Teaching Gram the computer was sort of like that, because I’ve been using computers for so long, I don’t even remember what it was like to learn the basic skills. And I was young then. As I age, I understand more and more what it’s like to have the world change around you and you feel left behind, powerless, a bit like a baby. You should see me compose text messages on my phone: I’ll never have problems with text messenging thumb pain. There’s enough time for relaxation and healing between each letter and the next while I squint and poke around, trying to figure out if s is on 7 or 8.

It was frustrating for Gram to learn those first basic skills, but she was a quick study. She kept a binder of tips that I printed out for her: how to select a block of text, copy it, and paste it. What that little triangle was for when a bunch of text disappeared. Perhaps it’s less like being a baby and more like being dropped into a foreign civilization and find yourself expected to be an executive assistant. You thought you knew what you were doing, so much is assumed, so little spelled out.

After an initial learning curve, a cool thing happened. Gram became a bit of a computer savant around her neighborhood. She’d call us and say she had been over at a friend’s house, trying to help her figure out how to use e-mail. She’d say that another friend wanted help, but Gram didn’t do PCs. Then Gram exchanged e-mail addresses with friends and relatives of her generation, and she learned how to hit the “forward” button, and it was her turn to educate me. If you need to hear any Jewish haiku, you know who to call!

Gram called this week with a quaver in her voice. She was so angry at herself. Her e-mail had stopped working, and she’d called customer support, and four people tried to help her, and finally they said that she had set something up wrong with her e-mail. “We don’t support that,” she was told. Ha.

The problem was that she’d given information to the customer support person that they didn’t need to know. We set up an e-mail forwarder so that she could have a cool, personalized e-mail address like us. She told her ISP that e-mail address, and they said, well, then, it’s definitely your fault. We can’t help you. That was pretty upsetting.

So I dictated what she should tell them, and the next day I received a triumphant e-mail from her. My magic incantation had worked! It was, in fact, their fault, and they fixed it! All was well again.

I realize that these are things that we all go through in our technological world, but I am still amazed how much older adults have to learn day by day. When my husband’s mother was a child, there was no e-mail. You didn’t deal with technical support staff in India. Your telephone line was installed and maintained by a public utility. If you wanted to send a letter, you typed it and stamped it and put it in the mailbox. Even when I was a child, long distance phone calls were still special, still important.

It’s been an amazing, wild ride the last eighty-some years. And I’m amazed at all the seniors out there, like Gram, who are still in the swing of it. If in the real world a clumsy person is “all thumbs,” then when I’m texting I think I must be “all pinkies.” I can’t imagine being able to take up technology that bears no resemblance to what I grew up with with as much grace and dedication as Gram has.

Lacking fins or tail

great difficulty.