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The Newsletter >
The Magic of Magic Words
January 12, 2009
My laptop slid off the bed. I did not drop, throw, roll, toss, or skip it. It slid. It slid!
It slid from a soft pillow top mattress to an average grade carpet and suffered a cardio-infarction of the power cord, which bent. The power cord bent. The frame skewed decidedly to the left, and the screen went flat line. My laptop didn’t scream, shriek, or cry. It just went quietly into that great silent darkness that is like some massive black hole in the outer reaches of frigid space.
I screamed, shrieked, and cried—sometimes while holding my hands to the sides of my head and tearing at my hair. If I have written something, scribbled something, or thought about writing or scribbling something it resided inside that machine—now represented by a black flat line on the pie chart of life.
The screaming went on for a while. Mine.
The IT staff, my husband, arrived and asked stupid, stupid things like, “Did you drop it? How far did you drop it? Why did you drop it?”
“It slid. My foot caught in the power cord and it slid onto a carpet, A CARPET, not into a volcanic cavern at the bottom of a craggy abyss. I did not drop it! Is it dead?”
“Well, you can’t drop ‘em.”
“It slid—down—slid, sliding down. Slid.” I demonstrated the sliding with my hands, holding them at gentle, graduated angles against the bed.
He poked and clicked at various keys, and said, “I just hope the mother board isn’t . . .” He let the sentence trail off like a gypsy curse.
I wailed, “What’s a mother board? Is that where the typewriter keys are? Will I ever be whole again?”
He held the laptop up to his ear and listened. He clucked and shook his head.
This time when I held my breath hoping to pass out and end the horror that felt like scarab beetles gnawing at my cuticles, my five-year old granddaughter walked in. Seeing my dank distress and appraising the situation like a forty-six year old TV psychologist named Phil, she walked over, put her hand on my arm, and said, “YaYa, I know just how you feel.”
The evil spell was broken. I took a deep breath, figured that the hard drive was still in one piece, and wondered if I could wheedle a new computer out of the deal.
Later, I looked at my husband and said, “She’s five years old, and she knew the magic words. You’re fifty years old, and your bedside manner stinks—still. What’s with that?”
“I thought the magic words were, “Take cover, Linda, I had a chili dog at the airport.”
“Well . . .” I sighed, “there are those magic words.”
I sighed again, and patted him on the head. “And don’t think I don’t appreciate when you say them, because I do. I really do. Nothing says love like you yelling, ‘Warning, gas leak.’ You’re the best, babe, and I mean it.”
And I did.
He squared his shoulders and looked pleased with himself.
“And nobody can listen to a dead computer like you can.”
He said. “Don’t worry. The hard drive is probably fine; it might be time for a new computer.”
Ahhhh! The magic of magic words.
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