Kathryn Atkins

In a way, I envied her.  She didn’t own a computer. She had a cell phone for three months but never used it.  She told her kids to take it back.  She had time to read and do crafts, take long walks, and go to lunch with friends.  She attended live lectures, went to the library, enjoyed museums, picnics at the park, and face-to-face conversations with her grandchildren, who squirmed much of the time, unused to talking without a keyboard and a computer screen as part of the interaction. She could see the kids’ expressions, touch their knees or hands, and help them understand social interplay the old-fashioned way.

Mrs. Manfred didn’t need a computer and didn’t use email or instant messages. She wrote notes to people, did her banking inside the bank, visited friends, and had the bridge club at her house once a month. The book club was on the third Thursday of the month, bridge club on the second Tuesday, and baby quilters on the fourth Friday.  Mrs.M. volunteered at the local hospital stuffing envelopes and helping the cooks put little white cups on the trays for the patients.  She wore a hairnet sometimes, and gloves and an apron for other jobs.  The apron came down to the floor, and the extra small gloves hung off her tiny hands like a four-year-old dressing up in her mom’s clothes. The hairnet was a big blue surgical hat. The hospital purchased them at a huge discount in the tens of thousands, making Mrs. M look like a cross between a blue mushroom, and a very short chef. Her died red hair poked out from under the blue hat, clown style.

She laughed easily. She had a razor-sharp mind and a heart of expanding elastic, especially for children.  Her favorite volunteer work was reading to kids in hospitals, schools, churches, and libraries.  It was becoming a lost art, and she cried when the safety laws required that she wear a badge, get fingerprinted, TB tested, and background checked all so she could have an “aide” in the room while she read to the kids. 

“All I want to do is entertain and teach the children,” she said. The laws had changed, the world had changed, the people had changed.  It became too much of a hassle for her and eventually, she had to cut way back because they couldn’t find the “aide” person. In fact, when she gave up driving for Lent one year, her daughter couldn’t get her to the hospitals, and she had to stop for a few days. It was a loss for the kids and left a huge void in Mrs. M’s wonderfully abundant heart.

When cell phones stopped working, and the internet coughed and faded for a 24 hour period. Mrs. Manfred’s life did not change at all, except the people in the retirement home came down to the central meeting room in a trickle at first and then in a steady stream. Finally, they arrived in a torrent, and the room was awash in blue hairs so that the chattering and laughing brought life back into the home that usually served as the quiet waiting area for an appointment with Death. New acquaintances became fast friends. The internet could stay broken forever as far as they were concerned.

Alas, the internet came back on the next day, and Death and his friend Depression resumed their march. The spell was broken, which ironically spelled a loss for humanity.

Mrs. M. resumed her rounds, but with a little more fervor. She would try very hard to keep things as they had always been. No cell phones. No internet. Just her and her red hair. I envied her. Yes, I did.