1st
February 2015
Dear Cassi,
I recall I once told you of my first computer. I
cannot recall if I mentioned the events leading up to the fail of my word
processor which was an old silver gray thing with a blocky body. In short it
broke and needed fixing in length it wasn’t worth keeping around, but an
important part of this was my depression.
It took me forever to do anything at the age of
fourteen. I could hardly lift my hands to type and so it would take me all day
to write anything. A great question is ‘why I lived my life as a cold sack of
meat?’ and I haven’t any real answer. One possibility is that I had a vitamin
deficiency, another that I was just depressed, but the question is irrelevant
now.
There was an assignment over the summer, the first
assignment of high school English, to read ‘Great Expectations’ by Charles
Dickens and then pick out quotes to talk about in a paper. I remember having to
build a fort of books to get this done. I couldn’t lift my hands far enough to
type and so made a structure that would permit my hands to rest on the keyboard
while I was lying down.
Now the old word processor was a hand me down from
my two older siblings and it should have been a few years past its life
expectancy. It didn’t take well to my slow workings and all that time running
and conked out.
My homework was trapped on the proprietary file
format of that old contraption, and we had to get if fixed. I did try showing
my teacher the disk and having him try to open it, but that proved fruitless.
We had the machine repaired, and I got my work turned in but the word processor
failed a second time.
It was at this point I pushed for a computer and
got Alan’s normal response ‘now is a bad time, there’s too many new things
coming out.’ I looked at him and said ‘there are always new things coming out’.
In a week I had a computer.
As an odd note, he took the word processor to be
used by my step siblings and I never saw it again. Good riddance, they had a
computer but it was rather old and, as I recall, had no hard drive.
Never fear change, little sister,
Richard Leland Neal
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