Go ahead, call me a Luddite. It’s not true.
Or… well… it’s not completely true. Not anymore.
If you’re not familiar with the term, a Luddite is a person who fights against automation, computerization, or new technologies in general. Nobody knows for sure where the name comes from, but the original Luddites were a group of grumpy, scowling British textile workers and weavers in the early 1800s who destroyed new weaving machinery, fearing that industrialization would put them out of work. Since then, it has come to refer to anybody who stands up against the rising tide of new technology.
If my ink-on-paper explanation seems too incomplete, you can always Google “Luddites,” but only a non-Luddite would do something like that.
Anyway, I guess I can’t blame you for calling me a Luddite, because I’m pretty well known for dragging my feet when it comes to new technology.
After all, it took me years to finally give up listening to vinyl records and switch to cassette tapes — a decade or so after everybody else had given up cassettes and gone to CDs. I finally decided to follow them and turned to CD’s — about a decade after everybody else had switched to streaming music into their iPods, or iPads, or whatever it is that they stream stuff into. For the record, I have never “streamed” a song into anything but a cassette tape. And I don’t listen to CDs much anymore, either. Now I get my music the old-fashioned way — I turn on the radio and scowl until they play something good.
And while the rest of the world has turned to Facebook, Snapchat and other social media to stay connected with family and friends, I keep in touch with all the people I love the old-fashioned way — I sit in a chair and scowl until they stop taking all those damn snapshots of salads, and drop by the house for a chat.
And when everybody else simply asks Alexa if Charlton Heston is still alive, or how old he is (or would be), or how tall he is (or was), I just shrug and keep watching “Ben Hur,” or “The Ten Commandments” on the oldies movie channel and wonder how long it will be before he takes his shirt off. And then I scowl when he does.
So, go ahead, call me a Luddite. It might have been true once upon a time — but times can change.
And for me the change came a few weeks ago, when I went to Wisconsin with some old friends to visit our friend Bob, who recently got a nice place on a lake near Tomahawk.
We spent three days and nights at his place, doing all the things old friends do at a nice retreat in the woods. We strolled through the pines on his property, and searched for pretty stones along the rocky breakwater next to his beach, and took rides in his pontoon boat to view sand bars and islands. Each night, we visited a different supper-club and then rated one against the other to determine which had the best meal, the best drink, the best service, and everything else all the way down to the best north-woods ambiance.
But then, on the last full day of our visit, the wind rose up and the rain fell down, and we curled up and sat inside, all the way from sunup until supper-club.
Over the two previous days we had chatted our way through all the gossip, and the grandchildren, and the friend catch-ups. We played a board game or two, and then in the late afternoon on the third day things quieted down.
I sat with another cup of coffee in my lap and watched the rain stream down the windows as the waves beat against the dock pilings, and the pines shivered across the leaden sky. And I noticed that it wasn’t just quiet in the house. It was dead silent.
I gazed around the room and noticed that everybody in the house sat staring at a screen of some sort — cellphone, iPad, laptop, Kindle. Everybody but me, that is. Like an idiot, I was staring into a cup of coffee as whitecaps and pines waved back at me through a rain-streaked pane of glass.
I had no gripe against the silence. In fact, after three chatty days it was kind of nice to just sit surrounded by old friends who were comfortable enough in each other’s presence that they didn’t need to fill the air with gratuitous sounds.
But it would have been nice to have a book to curl up with there in front of the rain-streaked panes.
I decided then and there to get a Kindle the moment I got back home.
And I did. I checked out what kind of models were available, ordered one, and my Prime pals plunked it on my doorstep last week.
I’ve already downloaded my first book on it — “The Book Thief,” by Markus Zusak. But I won’t start reading it until I finish that paper-and-ink book my friend loaned me — “The Given Day,” by Dennis Lehane. And from what I’ve heard, each would be a great first book — or last book — to read when a guy takes a life-changing step as big as this one.
So go ahead, call me a Luddite. That was certainly true in the past. And it might still be true over the next few days while I finish that last paper-and-ink book before taking a high-tech leap. But it’s not completely true, because I’m now a modern-day guy with a Kindle sitting right there, waiting for me to pick it up once I’ve turned that last paper page.
In fact, I’ve written a limerick to commemorate the moment:
My Luddite gene’s starting to dwindle,
Like thread spooling off of a spindle.
It’s a pain in the neck
Finding good books low-tech—
I’m a Download-ite now with a Kindle!
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
