it lay in it’s own chrome shadow
for more than a year
on my desk.
the desk is it’s own junkyard accumulation of bills and cords and chargers for all the gadgets of the house. somehow they all just find their way there. every once in a while I sift through them and discard what I can identify as no longer relevant to a current piece of equipment. the device gets the boot long before the charger and the spare cords find their way to the trash. bills and brochures have their own pile on the left side of the desk top. they similarly get attention at unpredictable intervals the pile gets deeper or thinner shredded or filed from time to time.
the i-pod was a special case of actual equipment that lived next to the laptop and would have sat up on it’s legs (if it had any) and beg for attention and I would have absolutely loved to have given it some. unfortunately, my technical ability -like my general energy level- seems to have dwindled and is moving towards the vanishing point of my unamazing biologic perspective. what ever skill I have already processed and stored in my brain is all that I have to work with now. I am going no further. I have moved in fits though my adaptation to the computer, the cell phone, transistor’s, recordings on vinyl, magnetic tape, cd’s, dvd’s and the internet. I’ve made photos/images on a brownie, and a 35mm, and a video camera, and a digital camera that recorded postage stamp size photos on floppies. the i-pod with its sleek touch screen had proved to be a step too far.
sheri gave it to me when I saw her in Atlanta. I got as far as figuring out how to make it play recorded novels through the speakers of my VW when I drove back up to New York. when I got home I tried to use it for other things but either for a lack of ability, a lack of desire to learn any more or laziness, I never did integrate it into my life. it sat. I charged it once in a while. if it had been cheese it would have turned to mold.
Ben is home for a visit. he and sixty thousand other young people took the test to become a fireman I am not sure why…he came to town for this and, anyway, I am very glad to see him for a while. he said a couple of times he would help me get over the hump with the i-pod. teach me to load the things I want on it and show me how to use it. but it didn’t seem like it was going to happen. then it did. he began to erase things from it and put things on it. he said it was going to be easy and I thought yeah. I used to be the one to say things like that. while he held an electric saw or a drill or the steering wheel of a car and I talked him through those learning processes. now it was my hand he was holding and the electrons were flowing. the i-Pod began to glow when he looked at it. when he punched the keys of the laptop, the electrons all pressurized snaking down and out through the white wire into the i-pod, it began to come to life. Ben was illuminated by his own glow. I stood over him and the i-Pod while they bonded and lighted up together.
he erased all traces of my wonderful brother-in-law. all his music all his history all the novels I had heard on the trip back from Atlanta and all the ones I had always intended to hear but never would have. he even erased the name of the i-Pod. it was time to rename the i-pod-like when a slave is sold and it becomes the property of the new master and the new master gives the slave a new name. “should I name it ‘Rand’s i-pod’”, he asked, and I realized it was not a good name.
it had lain face down in it’s own chrome shadow
on my desk for a year.
now as Ben looked up ready to baptize
I said “name it ‘Ben’s i-pod’”.
