I still struggle with time

[mouakter13]

A semi-recent editor/friend of mine, whom I helped very briefly, would laugh when I said I was a “dinosaur of print.”

I had meant I was old-school, in my thoughts and desires of writing and publishing.

He even gave me a self-made going away cartoon card. His art shows a large dinosaur head and tiny little reptilian appendages.

The cartoon roar coming from the vicious tyrana-something-or-other says, “My arms are too short to file copy!”

It makes me laugh. So much so that it greets me each country wise email marketing list day from behind a magnetized caricature of a marmot as I reach inside our Frigidaire.

I have tried to age well with the times.

From a single high school typing class on an old IBM taught from an instructor with an even older Underwood, I clicketly-clacked out “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” over and over until my weakened little piano fingers started leaving out some of the 26 letters of the alphabet. My mother always said I had the hands of a pianist but my digits were weaker than the strength of her parental love.

I detested typing class.

I loved my little Pee-Chee folder. Inside its peach-yellow exterior that showed old-timey athletes doing what old-time athletes do I carried my pencil writing ramblings of attempted humor and longings, scribbled out in poems and short paragraphs.

I never saw a computer until roughly 1997. Its eerie dial-up modem announcing that a washed-up commercial fisherman was writing his first news piece in a weekly paper.

And life just kept advancing.

My first cellphone in 2003. What wizardry was this?

And then, what? I can carry my computer on trips much like a portable sandwich cutting board — yes, I have used one as such.