During the past month or so, I’ve been tormented by IT malfunctions. The breakdowns themselves were unpleasant enough; frustrations with repairs made matters worse – so much worse I’ve considered going computer and smart phone free. I know someone who did that, but she was so afflicted with age that absence of electronic necessities didn’t affect her as much as it would someone who remains engaged with the day-to-day stuff of living. She still had bills to pay and official communications to respond to, of course, but they were written on pieces of paper and delivered by a postperson, and her family took care of their demands. She had a cell phone, but it was not smart, and to my knowledge, she used it only to call out.

Everyone of a certain age once lived without computers and cell phones, and lately, I’ve had a taste of it again. Both my laptop and my smartphone, which I normally depend on the way a scuba diver depends on an air hose, broke down. Many people have more than one computer and supplementary iPads and such, but I don’t.  I resent the expense of having even one; on principle, I refuse to buy a spare.

The local tech repair company sent my laptop to a place where better geeks gather. I imagine something like a techie leper colony whose inmates jabber about coding and such in a language not spoken by normal humans. And then, during the ten days my machine was gone, my phone malfunctioned.

I went through some, though not all, the classic stages of grief – I got stuck on pissed-off and depressed, and I never got even close to acceptance. This cold-turkey weaning bothered me especially in that it prevented me from following my writing habit. You might think that’s not a big loss, but it is to me. If I do not make daily entries in my diary and write Geezer essays, it is as if I have not lived. I don’t like feeling that way.

That’s when I had an idea, which – if  I could do it – would lead me out of darkness into the sunny light of day. I would write in longhand. Over the years, when I’ve had to, I made diary entries in longhand. As time has passed, my handwriting has become astonishingly illegible, but that doesn’t matter much. I seldom look at past diary entries other than as a memory aid. What was the name of that restaurant we liked in Istanbul in 2006? When I’ve puzzled through more than particular items, the entries have struck me as embarrassingly egocentric (where were the careful observations of current events?) and of little interest – even to me. My point is that if I had sometimes made diary entries in longhand, I should be able to write a Geezer essay that way.

It would be like what we did over and over in high school English class., an exercise I performed well enough to get high marks and positive regard. Maybe I still could.

To help with the problem of illegibility, I would channel my dad. He wrote legibly and gracefully despite working with his hands – hard hat, steel-toed safety boots, khakis – until he was almostmanaged fifty. (I’ve never understood how he could be both people.)  I found the fountain pen I’d bought years ago when he was on my mind. It’s like the one  Daddy used – a brown Shaeffer. I went to Staples for ink. Staples didn’t sell it; the clerks seemed unsure what ink was. I found a small container of Parker brand for seventeen dollars at an old-fashioned stationery shop.

That done, nothing remained but to start writing – slowly and carefully. It’s more difficult than I remembered. I shopped for cursive instruction manuals, which, by the way, seemed to me to be in the same elevated price tranche as ink. But before I went very far down that road, my laptop came back from tech ICU. The repair was unsatisfactory, but workarounds and occasional profanity make it work well enough so that you are not receiving this essay in a longhand facsimile.  I feel relieved.