Clickety, Clickety - Bip - It’s Mom

Last summer my brother said we should buy our mother a computer for Christmas. So we did.

She now has a new Pentium computer, a color printer and plenty of software. “This will keep me busy until I die,” she said. She has applied for a senior citizen discount from her on-line service.

Mother is particularly fascinated with a medical encyclopedia that came with the computer. It’s a med school on a CD-ROM disk. Every ailment recorded in human history is on that disk in multimedia glory, or perhaps that should be gory.

This program has a search function that allows her to type in an ailment or symptom and in seconds see all the suspect diseases. Or she can type in a disease and learn about the symptoms. It also includes recommended treatments for certain ailments.

Mother quickly realized that her computerized medical encyclopedia could make her a star on the senior circuit. Seniors don’t like sitting in crowded managed-care offices worrying about Medicare hassles before they explain their latest embarrassment to doctors younger than their children.

My mother can listen to a friend describe a new ailment over the telephone, type the symptom into her computer and reply, “Well, Mary, that sounds like a mild case of malofalia. It’s caused by a virus that lives in the esophagus of seven percent of three-toed Tibetan mountain goats. Has a goat sneezed on you lately?”

Another feature that captured her attention is e-mail. For several years my brother tried to talk us into getting computers so we could use e-mail. I was skeptical. It seemed so impersonal. Besides, he hasn’t written a dozen letters in 40 years. Why would computerized mail be different?

But not long after Mother got her own e-mail address, she wanted me to get one. Wired and inspired. My old home computer predates Bill Gates and Microsoft. It’s not up to Internet surfing.

I could resist my brother, but not a plea from my mother. I bought a new computer. Within hours, I also had an e-mail address. Soon e-mail was flying between my mother in Colorado, my brother in Washington, D.C., and me in Texas.

“I betcha we have written more letters to each other in the last week than in our total adult lives,” wrote my brother in one recent e-mail letter. Why, I can’t say, but he was right.

Before e-mail, letter writing required pen, paper, envelope and stamp. The effort practically meant that the writer must have something important or interesting to say. You don’t want to waste good stationery. E-mail is different. It is easy, instant and disposable. All comments are worthy for an e-mail message.

There may be some downside to this that I haven’t discovered. Surely someone will argue that computers and e-mail contribute to the coarsening of traditional letter-writing skills.

Perhaps. But for today’s scattered families, my reaction is that e-mail is a good thing. People will write an e-mail letter where they would not write a regular letter.

The other day my computer said, “You’ve got mail.” I checked and found a letter from an old friend who has never written me. He got my e-mail address from another friend and dropped me a note.

So far, my computer has not isolated me from society, which has been one of the knocks on computers. Instead, it has tied me closer to friends and relatives. I’m still not sure why.

Perhaps one reason occurred last night. The computer again said I had mail. The letter was accompanied by a request to download a photograph. I clicked on the download button and watched a color picture of my brother’s granddaughter appear on the screen. I’d never seen her before.

There’s nothing impersonal about that.

xxxx