Her fingers were not too shaky to type on the iPad. Without the spring-loaded keys of a regular keyboard she could press down fully on the iPad’s glass screen until she was ready for the next letter. Within minutes she wanted one of her own. And so we got her one of her own.
“It’s beautiful” she said when she opened it. Moments later, she was texting, her first ever. “Chad hi thanks for helping me please write every thing down for me.” A day later, after I showed her FaceTime, downloaded apps (Epicurious, the Weather Channel, Solitaire, WordSearch, and Talking Tom the Cat — the woman cannot get enough of Talking Tom the Cat), and tried, for the fourth time, to explain the difference between email and text messages, she begged again for me to give her a manual to take back to Holland. “You have to write down what I do with the camera that we see each other.”
The fear of forgetting how to use this new thing was overwhelming. It had taken a decade to get there, but now that she had this technology, she never wanted to lose it. After she made her first videochat call, she closed her eyes and brought her hands to her face. She was overwhelmed with what was finally within reach. “Already I don’t know how to live without it,” she said on her third day with it. I started to look into those Korean Internet rehab centers you always hear about.
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