Only As Old As You Feel

"Listen, Mom!" my 12-year-old daughter, Blossom, said to me the other day. She was working at my old laptop, and as she struck the keys a metallic, mechanical sound issued from the machine. "I made it sound funny!"

"That's a typewriter sound," I told her.

"Listen!" she repeated, hitting (I know) the 'Enter' key, and eliciting that old-school ratchet-and-ding. After a few more feverish taps, she looked up at me. "A typewriter?"

"Yes," I said, suddenly feeling about a million years old. "Remember when we went to the museum last summer, and saw those old machines in the Newspaper display?"

"Ohhh," she said. "You had one in grade school, right?"

"Yes," I said again, finding a chair and easing my ancient bones into it.

"Neat," Blossom opined, typing a few more lines. "That was before CD-ROM, right? You had to use floppy disks."

"No, dear," I answered. "Something even more archaic. It's called paper."