Black Oak's Daughter

Sometimes things going on in the world bother me. Not newsy things, but just general “progress”.   I think about things that I learned to love when I was younger. Old photographs,  notes that my grandfather wrote, the recipe box that held all of my grandmothers handwritten baking recipes, my daughter’s schoolwork.

I think about what we’re losing because of computers and technology. I’ve made a conscious effort to preserve some family history in it’s original form, but I’ve also digitized a lot of it into a software package that was designed to organize things like that.  To me, the computer is a tool, but in the process of using that tool we lose the tangible. I hate that.

I have a note pad where my grandfather wrote all of the family births, deaths, marriages, and a few baptisms.  I never met my maternal grandfather. He died before I was born, but I have this tangible evidence that he existed, and that he cared enough to want to preserve our history for his progeny.  I have his wife’s recipe file. It was handed down to my mother, and then to me. The one thing I remember about my grandmother was that there was always some fresh baked treat to snack on. She used to feed me cookies because she thought I was too skinny. My daughter once made a mask out of clay in the shape of a cat head. The ear is broken, but I still have it. It’s a cool mask.

These things are much more valuable to me than my so called “valuables”.   They connect my past with my present, and occasionally I use them to move into the future.  Some of my grandmother’s recipes have become part of my own repertoire.  My grandmother was born in 1888.  It’s oddly comforting to me to use a recipe that my grandmother made a century ago to nourish people in my life.

My generation were the first to really have access to personal computers.  For the first ten years or so, my main use for them was word processing.  I wrote all of my papers for college on a PC Jr. and later an 8088. I printed them out with my dot matrix printer and my prof’s graded them and returned them to me. That was tangible, it was just a fancy typewriter. We still turned in words on paper then. Some of my papers still exist in my files. It was tangible.   These days the college kids e-mail their papers to their professors. It’s a whole new world.

Also, 99% of what I write never gets printed. Whether it’s at work, or here.  I keep back up’s of everything but when I want to refer back to something, there’s nothing tangible except a few bits on a hard drive to search for.

The world’s focus has shifted from printed word to electronic.  I’m just as guilty of it. I have my laptop, and my iPhone, and my other toys of the digital age. I even have a digital camera. It’s got real camera optics, but no film. The pictures that I take only exist digitally until I decide otherwise. I never have to print an image again if I don’t want to.  It may seem silly, but sometimes I print an image just to “have” it. Looking at it on the computer isn’t enough. I’m also really torn about things like the Kindle.  Good Lord what a cool little gadget, but there’s nothing like holding a book and turning real pages, and it bothers me that the generation that follows my daughter’s may not even use real books.  I have a room full of real books and  there was a time in my life when the funnest thing to do when shopping was go to B&N and search their bargain books for anything interesting and then sit and read them over the next few days.

As a society it feels like we are losing so much knowledge because of the “information age”.  The real information, the important stuff, isn’t on the computer.  We’ve lost the fact that the computer is a tool. It has become a necessary appendage to any business. Because of that, to some extent, we’re losing our humanity, our vulnerableness, our common sense.

I wonder what the next generation will be like. The kids that are being born now- What will they value? What treasures will be left for them? Their grandmother’s recipes will be in electronic cook books, their photographs and scrapbooks will also be digital files. They won’t have any clue what it’s like to hold a notepad that their grandparents wrote little facts in solely for the sake of keeping the information, or what their grandmother’s handwriting was like because their recipes have all been entered into some cookbook software that’s easily indexed and cross referenced by ingredient, course, or nationality.

It did my heart good this week that my daughter blogged about my mother’s gardens.  She remembers the beauty, and the work that went into them. Her grandparents, my mom and stepdad, were always busy working in the yard and there was always more to do.   My daughter loves the out doors. She’s hiked up and down more mountains than I ever have.  I’m glad that she grew up with people that interacted with the world around them. I don’t want her to lose that. I don’t want her to lose the respect that she has for the world because she’s interacted with it.

I also have all these treasures that will one day be hers.  She’s promised that she has no intention of having children. That’s her choice. But even if she doesn’t, I want her to understand where she came from. I want her to think about things like how her grandfather homesteaded in the “Wild West” at the beginning of the 20th century when the Indian Wars were still going on 10 miles from where he lived. I want her to understand about her uncles that were soldiers. I want her to know how magical it was when my parents were together, and I want her to experience that kind of love for herself.  These things, these treasures that I have keep those stories alive.

The ironic thing, is that she knows those stories because I’ve written them here, so I can’t totally rant against computers.  I can hope that we find a balance between the digital and the tangible world. They can complement each other, or they can destroy each other.  My computer is important to me too, but the time that I treasure is the time I spend making memories with my friends, showing them the artifacts of my personal history, talking about our stories, and planning our respective futures together.

Those moments are the real treasures.

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