A Long Journey and an Old Machine

Connections and they way things sometimes work

Swell.  I just started up Microsoft Word on a computer that I bought in August 2011 (now 13 years ago) and had thought lost to time.  When I purchased it I was about to travel for an unexpected jaunt to Azerbaijan where music industry friends wanted me to attend a classical music festival to be held in the Azeri hills at a resort called Gabala.  There was no sense in dragging my expensive and somewhat heavy laptop computer through customs and whatever else I might encounter in a country that bordered Iran, so I purchased an ASUS EE PC Seashell series – a low-priced notebook computer.

As to the trip, arranged by my hosts, it came and it went.  Turkish Airlines, via Istanbul, took me to Baku, where I was forbidden to take photographs in the special arrival lounge (being a guest of the chamber of commerce).  There was always tea, soda, and candy.  An hours-long van conveyance took me and a Berlin-based film crew up a winding two-lane road into the mountains, well past sunset, passing roadside stores of displayed preserves, interspersed with expensive car dealers.  I saw a barbershop whose chairs were outside.  The heat of the day made indoor work in this former republic of the Soviet Union tough.  Yet, oil money had brought in the luxuries for some.  The highlights of the evening were stopping for more tea and hard candy plus nearly ramming into an oblivious cow standing in the middle of the lane.  Much to my surprise, the resort itself (reached at about ten at night) looked as if it belonged on the Vegas strip, complete with lines of glorious fountains and a pink marble entrance.  I accepted the luxuries graciously.

The opportunities promised through the exhausting adventure (which included the layover in Istanbul where men dressed in terrycloth robes as they roamed the ample airport terminal) didn’t exactly materialize.  My hosts were mainly interested, as it turned out, in what they thought was my money, having just left a large company after 14 years.  I was taken to a piano factory one day and told of glorious business plans to sell the instruments in the US.  The wife of my hosts – a well-respected concert pianist, seemed to expect me to produce a series of recitals for her back in New York. 

Given that I showed no interest in investing in either of their ventures I was sent home without even a tour of Baku.  I had been looking for a job.  They had been looking for an investor.  I did at least get to hear some decent music, including a bizarre Tchaikovsky concerto performance with a soloist who is now banned from performing in the states due to his unwavering friendship with Vladimir Putin.  The evenings of Azeri mugham and its indelible quarter tones were memorable just the same.  I even got to meet and dine with a famous violinist I had seen in college as part of an arts series.  There were other greats floating around, giving the trip a kind of surreal sense of having been almost made up.

I jetted back home, disappointed and tired.  The little Asus machine (running the now-unsupported Windows 7), having served me as needed, gently aged into relative obsolescence.  In recent years, even the little backup battery expired, necessitating a clock and date reset every time the machine was cold started.  Weeks ago, my main and coveted home office PC – another relic, still running Windows 10, began to show signs of failing health.  It would start up and immediately shut down.  On a second try it might find its way to a green screen where I would have to ask it to continue.  Then I’d usually get to Windows, which represented a hallowed plateau each time.  I had started to back up some important folders when on a recent morning the machine refused to find its way to Windows.  No routine of repair or restoration was apparently possible without more research or expertise.  For the time being I had to pick up pieces with other machines  – the phone, the iPad, and a revived Macbook Pro, also a relic but now running a fast flash drive with more RAM.  I was surprised with what still worked well and grateful for the other gadgets and programs still retaining all my user names and passwords.

A long-time photographer, I had backed up my camera work on other drives, even if, for now, I couldn’t really edit them properly, should a purchase arise.  Lying in bed, suffering from the loss of my computer family member I would see the neoprene carrycase for the little seldom-visited Asus machine.  It had no extra drives, minimal RAM, a twelve-inch screen, tiny speakers, and a dyspeptic processor that made video calling look like a demo from a 70s science museum.  Yet it was a computer.

I was quickly coming to the conclusion that it might not even be allowed on the Internet anymore, just like my ancient Windows 98 machine (still guarding a hard drive from 25 seasons past) and my still-somewhat communicative Windows XP machine from twenty-one years ago.  Both of those machines had participated in a fairly recent midi music project where floppy discs and long-expired programs were needed.  Getting any information at all out of the 98 machine meant only using the floppy drive.  It was like reaching a catatonic patient.  Such is the entropy of technological progress.

Again out of the neoprene case, I started up the Windows 7 machine (upon which I am writing this piece) and was immediately faced with the terrible realization that I had forgotten the local password that I thought I knew.  Perhaps I had changed it within the last few years and had blocked out the memory.  I was informed by the machine’s lock screen that one could make a password recovery tool using a floppy disc or USB thumb drive, but I only had one working PC – the one I couldn’t enter.  The Mac couldn’t help.  I was resigned to the possibility that I might never be able to guess the ‘new’ password, even with the hint I had supplied on the screen.  I couldn’t interpret the hint!

But then, the mind works this way – memories are assembled and ancient mnemonic files are re-opened.  Gradually the memory is placed back into the frame.  After scores of attempts I suddenly flashed on what the hint meant, put in the password, and was instantly met with my old desktop – a nice moment.  Thereafter, I realized that the password was quite familiar, a slight variation of others I had used again and again.  I just hadn’t needed the use of that memory for a time until the desk staff in my brain could look it up.

After another hour or so of configuring and updating, I found that I had a decent functioning computer – even one with browsing privileges, though it couldn’t officially be upgraded beyond Windows 7.  Given the Internet access I had with my other devices, such a feature ran second to the fact that I could write on it.

The keyboard was great (and still new), and Word 2010 was on-board.  I could now think of the machine as a typewriter with extras.  There would be no checking for e-mail, no clicking on social media time wasters (at least not so easily, given the processor), and writing to the screen was zippy.

I own several typewriters – one of which, the one my mother bought in 1958, still works like new.  I had it serviced and rebuilt years ago by a man who even baked the metal parts in oil.  This was the machine I took to college.  Years before that, I’d hear my mother banging on it for hours as she crafted dispatches, with carbons, to our stateside family units from our Caribbean addresses in Aruba, and later Puerto Rico.  I realize that the bell on that Olympia Deluxe SM3, signaling the approaching margin, is my earliest preserved unchanged sound memory.  I confess that I am working up the courage to begin writing with it again.  Having a writing machine creates the needed on ramp for simply producing, in the spirit of that typewriter which told so many tales.

I hate making mistakes on a typewriter, and even my piano hands have to get used to the key tension, but I love that sense of roaring down the textual straightaway when all the keys are flying right and fast, and the sentence comes out practically whole.  It’s nothing but you and the blank page and thoughts that ensue – so hard to find in the age of diversions.

I will finish writing my observations on this resurrected and nearly-obsolete, Intel-Atom-powered, super-light, no frills, virtual typewriter.  I’ll gently pull up the imagined paper (always making it two sheets to protect the platen) and enjoy the zipping gears.  At least I can thank Azerbaijan for that.