Jun 25 2009
My Mom’s electronic legacy
My mother passed away earlier this month. Had she been my age, she would definitely have been an impressive technogeek. My husband Russ and I routinely upgraded her electronics, quieter faster PCs, swapping the tube display for a flat panel and from VCRs to DVD players and finally getting her a hearty highyo speedy Internet connection enabling her to watch the many videos we and her friends would send her.
Mom was a stickler for the proper-looking document and while she didn’t write on the computer every day, she was annoyed when she couldn’t remember how to do a hanging indent in Microsoft Word (heck I still don’t know how to do one). And it was my mother who announced to us, “If I forward my WebTV messages to my AOL account, then I can print them out.” This from a very hip octogenarian.
Going through her things over the past couple of weeks, there, on the desktop screen (she knew I’d see it) was a file called “MyLife.doc” all 21 pages ready to print out for friends and members of the family who maybe didn’t know all her courageous and amazing experiences in Europe, Asia and the US. And in another file all her favorite recipes that will find their way to Blurb.com into an illustrated cookbook this Christmas. And her joke file. She printed them out for non-tecchy friends.
So here we are, looking at a veritable timeline of electronics in her living room. An old hi fi in a cabinet with built-in turntable from the 60’s. Piled on top of that were various components - tuner, CD changer, amplifier from the 80’s. And another turntable. And a rack of LPs that hadn’t moved in some 20 years. And in the basement of the house a wall of old ’78s and volumes of sheet music from my grandmother, the voice teacher.
Mom enjoyed her CDs, mostly classical, vocals by Anna Netrebko and Renee Fleming, but she loved Billy Joel’s “Fantasies and Delusions” with exquisite solo piano performance by Richard Joo. And Gershwin. She loved Gershwin.
She never moved from VCR to DVR to record the one soap she followed. So the VCR remained amidst the DVD changer and cable box. But please, masters of the consumer electronics industry, why can’t remote controls be simpler? They’re downright cruel and certainly not meant for senior citizens, and not even for younger folk.
So we’ll divvy up the components, providing some to homeless shelters, bringing some to recycling stations found at http://mygreenelectronics.org/. We’ll bid farewell to the old 60’s hi fi cabinet somehow. I remember very early childhood sounds of the Clay-Liston fight coming from its huge speaker. That one big piece of electronics gear that marked an era for me. Could you imagine your iPod as a piece of furniture?
