An Angle on the Eiffel Tower

Technology baffles and amazes me.  So many changes in my lifetime that I feel like a dinosaur hatching out beside the runway at O’Hare. 

I grew up in the age when we imagined what the Lone Ranger looked like; there were no pictures on the radio.  After I moved to Chicago, I wrote my mother a letter every week.  Long distance calls were expensive.  It was a special occasion when Wally’s Uncle Holger, who worked for the telephone company, let me call my parents at Christmas. 

Before David and I went to Europe, I wrote to my son Karl in Germany, telling him when our plane would arrive and asking him to make reservations for a place for us to stay.  When he didn’t meet our plane, we chased him down at the Army’s Fifth Corps Headquarters in Frankfurt.  I learned not to depend on others to take care of me. 

I have no idea how a computer works.  Fortunately, David grew up to be a computer whiz.  He set up my computer so I can do my blogs.  I knew how to use the keyboard.  I learned to type on an ancient manual typewriter (a 1898 Smith-Corona, old when I inherited it).  It took me several years to sum up courage to use the mouse.

Last week David’s little girl, Alli, celebrated her tenth birthday.  We talked on Scype.   When David and Martha’s son, Doug, were here for my birthday in March, they attached a little ball on top of my computer monitor.  It is a camera.  While I sat in my room in Garland, Texas, I could see Alli sitting at her Dad’s computer in Irvine, California.  To me that was magic. 

I told Alli about the trip to Europe when her father was 13 years old.  When I said we went to Paris, Alli asked, “Did you see the Eiffel Tower?”  Another modern marvel: a 10-year-old knows enough about the World to associate the Eiffel Tower with Paris.  On the other hand, Sara Pallen didn’t know Africa was a continent, not a country.  Depends on whom you are talking to.

“Yes,” I told Alli.  “David and I went to the Eiffel Tower and took an elevator up to a platform, where we ate ice cream and looked at the view.” 

I tried to describe the elevator.  The legs at the base of the Eiffel Tower spread out.  I raised my arm and swept it across my head.  I wasn’t very good at describing the shape, but Alli had seen pictures and knew what I meant.  I told her the elevator was a big box that held 50 or so people.  It went up the leg at an angle.  I don’t know if Alli could even imagine what a weird sensation it was, moving upward at 45 degrees. 

Modern technology is wonderful, but no matter how many pictures and movies you see, to know a place – any place, the Eiffel Tower or the Fort Worth Zoo – you have to be there and experience it “alive and in person.”   You have to feel your bones chilled by a wet day in London and suck in air which burns your lungs on a 110 degree day in Dallas in order to begin to understand the difference between England and Texas.  No instant pictures made on a cell phone can capture that.