World Book Encyclopedia, The Merriam Webster Dictionary and The Thesaurus– versus Google, Kindle, Amazon prime, Facebook, Instagram, and a myriad of search engines plus.Our days of licking our fingers to turn the pages are virtually over. Although I still love a hard cover over a battery operated read. Who else can easily bring to mind memories of brown paper bags with pencil calculated totals of grocery store purchases? Anyone else struggle thru long division or angles and intersecting lines geometrically speaking? How about looking up Ticonderoga and cutting out pictures from National Geographic Magazine for a cut and paste project on Africa? Oh, and carrying that erstwhile science project to school hoping it wouldn’t spill or rip. 

What happened to Ed Sullivan on Sunday night, Tom and Jerry Saturday mornings and yes the guilty pleasure of Luke and Laura’s General Hospital Wedding? Some days going at a slower pace with the absence of having to re-boot anything is high up on my “only if” list.

My iPad lost internet connection over the week-end. As I re-visit the feeling of panic (and I imagine I am not alone)- I find it bluntly disturbing. If we step back and chronicle the speed at which life has reinvented communication it can take our breath away- literally. Some days it  

 feels like a race to get to the front of the line to buy coveted tickets to a favorite concert. What happened to the languid walks home from school, stopping for a milkshake and French fries and lingering to avoid homework time? How bout dialing a phone, getting a busy signal and wondering which friend your best friend was talking to? “Can it be that it was all so simple then? Or has time re-written every line?” Tell me Barbra can you relate? So just for today, I will pay less attention to the frequency of sound as my messages come in. I will take pause at my full world of electronics and explore some old hand written behaviors. And then I will resume my modern world routines, turn up the dimmer on my light and wonder where I misplaced the bag of pencil sharpeners. I know I have them somewhere.