Whole Life Times: Connection

May 2008 | Life, the Universe and Everything

Connection

By Lydie Raschka

The Time Warner technician, while installing high-speed Internet service in our home, told me I am the last person in the city to have dial-up. The last, he said, with certainty. But I am not the last. Plenty of people still function without one or more modern technological conveniences.

I do not have a cell phone, for instance, thinking, perhaps illogically, that I’ll pick and choose my technology. I’ll make it work for me, not me for it. I’ll be available — but only to a point. I made this choice even though it means alienating friends who don’t like fixed time-and- place appointments, having an encyclopedic knowledge of working pay phones in my neighborhood, and worrying about my twelve-year-old’s safety in the city. But I’m a writer in search of mental space. My mind feels stretched as it is, filled with phrases and snatches of talk that may or may not be important to my work and which crowd out practicalities until I can barely function.

During the process of bundling and upgrading to DSL, however, my existing electronic conveniences failed me, forcing me to reckon with my growing dependence on technology. It would be a day before I found an unopened box on the windowsill and realized I had neglected to hook up the telephone adaptor. All I knew was my home phone went dead the same day my email quit. It got spookily quiet at our house. My son, who functions without cell phone, email or iPod was reading a comic, content in his world, unaware of our disconnection to the rest of humanity. I heard our cats playing with a crumpled tea bag wrapper. I heard the sound of our chewing at dinner. I felt like a sixteenth century barefoot nun (with a twelve-year-old). I had to reach deep into my soul to find inner peace before the exterior peace threatened to drive me up the wall.

I called Earthlink’s help number on a pay phone. A woman with an Indian accent answered. She asked for the model number on the modem. Enunciating calmly (given my state of agitation due to the length of time it had taken to get her on the line) I said I did not realize I needed the model number and could not look at it without hanging up, crossing the street and going back home. My phone did not work, I reminded her, which was why I was on the street calling from a pay phone. “We are sorry for the inconvenience,” she held firm.

I went back to my building to connect with my neighbors. I knocked on Pat’s door, Karen’s door and Elizabeth’s door. They were out, out, out. I went to Kate’s apartment, a block away, leaving my son home to finish his drawing of the phases of the moon for homework. “Look, mom,” he said, before I left, “a waxing crescent moon.” Over his shoulder I glanced distractedly at his drawing — a thin sliver of white on deep blue. Kate let me borrow her cell phone but had no time to chat; her daughter, Catherine, was memorizing the Gettysburg Address. The Gettysburg Address! “Who needs it,” I grumbled: “Doesn’t the kid know how to hook up DSL?”

At home I turned on the computer and piggybacked on a neighbor’s WiFi, connecting with Sam R., my very first “live chat” ever — a strange, disembodied experience with all the formal patter of a courtesy call… until he hung up on me. When he told me to “powercycle my ATA” I wanted to type bad words into the rectangular space.

“What does ‘powercycle my ATA’ mean, please?” I wrote.

Sam R. repeatedly used language I could not comprehend — router, adaptor, ATA — while I repeatedly tried to get him to speak plain English: “Do you mean the yellow plug?”

I thought wistfully of the days when “bundled” meant holding my newborn son in my arms; and of an even earlier time, when I bundled wood as a Girl Scout, in Michigan.

Sam R. and I were never going to connect.

I made strong coffee and read a chapter of the The Interior Castle by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, who writes passionately about “trials” and the role of pain in the growth of the soul. Outside my window was a perfect waxing crescent moon.

Fortified, I dialed the call center again with Kate’s cell. A man from India — no doubt a spiritual man — patiently helped me focus on the lost adaptor, which I found, and told me which set-up diagram to follow.

Like a miracle, comprehension came. In no time at all I was plugging and unplugging cables like a pro.

Connection, I thought with a sigh, as I picked up the phone to the soothing buzz of the dial tone.

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