Where the heck have I been, you may be asking.
I’ve been to The Valley to buy a new hip. The old one was bone on bone with the rest of me. I suspected as much because for weeks I couldn’t make the 11 steps from my desk to the refrigerator. I’d assumed the pain was God’s way of punishing me for all that weight lifting I did as a kid. My stepmother warned me the day she caught me making a muscle in the mirror that I’d probably “turn queer” before prom night but she never mentioned limping. Walking funny, yes, but not limping. No, my doctors explained, vanity is not punishable; your stepmother was a jerk, the weight lifting was good for you. We’re like machines, that’s all. Our parts just wear out.
So I’m a disappearing act.
And in the process I seem to be going out of style. Hurtling into the familiar abyss of what was and is no more. There’s so much out there today that most people take for granted that I don’t begin to understand. For instance, it took me years to succumb to the computer as a tool. I still miss the feel and the sound of my Olympia Manual typewriter-tick, tick, ding . After all, we collaborated on dozens of grocery lists and a pair of novels. These days she lives in solitude on the carpet at the bottom of my closet. I’m not ashamed to admit I feel a twinge of guilt for covering her with a soft towel and placating her with the big lie: “Rest awhile, Sweetie, I’ll see you by-and-by.” I can’t bear to face her. I soothe myself with the fact that I can no longer lift her.
Lately, I cope in the quagmire of e-mail. And I’ve even learned how to clear my files every couple of weeks. But I don’t begin to understand “Facebook.” Nor do I get “Kindle,” “Skype,” “Tweet” or “Twitter.” And I have no idea what a “URL” is. Do you pronounce it “earl” or “yurl?” Or is it intended to be unpronounceable, meant to be seen and not heard like I was when I was nine? And do we all have a “URL” and if so, what does it do and does it leave the body after death?
And what about all those passwords? Everything of interest to me, worthwhile or not, requires a password along with a complicated registration process. How do you remember all those passwords? Do you make a list? And where do you keep the list? In a computer file marked “Passwords?” One that undoubtedly requires a password. The system is designed to keep my secrets safe, even from me.
I use one standard password for everything. Figure it out and you’re privy to all of me.
I also find that I’m more afraid than I was 10 years ago. Is that part of the wearing-out process? I’d never get on a roller coaster today, whereas in olden times I did repeatedly till I threw up. Nor would I climb into a rickety biplane, which years ago I did unflinchingly alongside Rod Steiger on the way to a dense location in the Sierra Madres, one that our pilot-still smashed from the night before-missed on the first three tries.
Fear, I think, is a familial throwback. My father was afraid to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge for two years after it opened. He was convinced it was just waiting for his Ford V-8 to get to the middle before it collapsed into the ocean. My Aunt Stella was inordinately terrified of mice. My grandmother was fearful of escalators and Jews.
My appetite has recently shrunk as well, which I take as a sign of imminent disappearance. It began to wear out during my three-week stay at the hip replacement rehab joint where I was observed 24/7 by half the Hispanic and Filipino populations of the West Valley. Time was I ate everything on my plate but walnuts and raisins. But in rehab every breakfast included a cold fried egg. I tried to switch to hardboiled. “Un huevo dificil,” I said repeatedly, which literally means a difficult egg, not a hardboiled one, but I figured difficult and hard are synonymous, right? Maybe they’ll figure it out and bring me a breakfast that works at any temperature. “Tambien, caliente up the coffee, por favor.” Finally, a lovely attendant grasped the problem, put my breakfast tray on my lap and tried to brighten my morning by placing the palm of her hand over my fried egg. “See? Warm today.” And forget lunch and dinner. Turkey Tetrazzini or thereabouts. The upside of disappearance is that I shed nine pounds around the middle.
In an attempt to move my remains into the current century I twitched my young cousin in San Francisco with my computer questions and he twatted back to me:
“According to a random tech dictionary, an URL (pronounced “Earl”) is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locater, global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web. The first part of the address is called a protocol identifier and it indicates what protocol to use and the second part is called a resource name and it specifies the IP or the domain name where the resource is located. The protocol identifier and the resource name are separated by a colon and two forward slashes.”
Yeah, but I can diagram a compound sentence.