Romance at 80

Remember Helen Trent?  The heroine of a long-running soap opera, she proved "what so many women long to prove...that romance can begin at 35."  I thought of that program recently in connection with the MacBook Air, which proves that romance can begin not only at 35 but at 80.

I first saw it when our computer technician, who had come to help me install a new printer, pulled out his MacBook Air, and I fell in love.  I remembered then a similar sensation when I first saw the Jaguar XK120, a two-seater manufactured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  I was in the American army then, during the aftermath of the Korean War, stationed at Fort Totten, in Bayside, Queens.  Since I had to work staggered shifts, I often had my mornings and afternoons free, when I would travel into Manhattan.  It was there that I first saw that glorious machine, the most beautiful car, in my opinion, ever made.  It combined voluptuously feminine curves with great power (the 120 refers to its maximum speed), very much like the MacBook Air.

I had been toying with the idea of replacing my four or five-year-old PC, whose increasing slowness was beginning to annoy me and whose hard disk was continuing to fill beyond the point that I thought safe.  When I saw the technician's MacBook Air, felt its lightness and imagined the pleasure it would be to travel with it, I decided to buy one.  Our technician returned and installed and formatted it for me, transferring my files from the old computer to the new one.  I'm typing on it now for the first time.

The MacBook Air proved that romance is not dead at 80.  I'm hoping that it will also prove that an 80- has year man can learn a new system.  After all, I've been working on PCs since the 1980s, so its various shortcuts are automatic for me.  Now I hunt for keys that are not there ("page up" for example).  I don't yet know the most elementary commands, such as "print" or "move cursor to the end of the line." I don't yet know how to copy this essay and paste it onto my blog.  Perhaps my 13-year-old grandson will be kind enough to give me a tutorial.  In the meantime, I've learned, to paraphrase Johnson, that while romance has many virtues, it has also many pains.




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