I was the fastest reader. Had the neatest handwriting. Skipped rope without missing a beat. Basically there was nothing I couldn’t do if I put my mind to it except geometry but who really needs geometry?

Then the age of technology pulled in. To stay.

For about the first ten years I said: This is not for me. I don’t need it. It’s from the other side. It’s a trap.

Well maybe this is all true but when your own mother sends you an e-mail and you need an interpreter to send one back you know it’s time to catch on a little.

When every store or business or phone bill sends you an e-mail with the information it’s time to catch up.

Three of my children one only 11 sat with me to teach me how to open the computer and get to the place I needed.

That took about an hour.

Lesson One.

I took a two-week break before they started to explain e-mail.

Once you’re in you can compose and reply even attach a file (which I haven’t mastered yet) and do a quick spell check. And I wonder what was so hard? Like the outside world wonders what was so hard?

This must be how someone in the 19th century felt when they bought their first Bell Telephone. Do I press a button? Lift the receiver first or dial?

I don’t exactly want to date myself but I had a record player. We’d place the needle on the record and songs came out. And typewriters with ribbons that got tangled and turned your finger tips black. Then came the tape recorder. That I could also understand —rewind fast forward or play.

But when the CDs arrived I was out of music for about a year or two.

I never thought I’d feel inferior. But the world stays one step ahead.

I spoke to a woman on the phone the other day she had to find an e-mail I’d sent her and she said “I want to cry I’m such an accomplished person and I just can’t get this computer business.” All she kept saying is “Hold on hold on one more second I’m sorry but I think I lost it. I think I lost the file.”

Technically challenged people can be successful in all parts of their lives but put them in front of a computer and they look lost and confused.

I was once in a computer store and a woman in her late 50s was trying to buy a laptop. The salesman was trying to explain the components of the laptop and she just wasn’t getting it. The salesman started to get frustrated. And she broke out in a semi cry “I don’t understand even my eight-year-old grandchild knows how to do this I just can’t get it!”

There’s a friend of mine who’s never touched a computer. She has a sewing box she says she raised her family with. She mended and fixed everything with it. She gave my daughter a fancy complete sewing box as a wedding gift. My daughter probably didn’t understand the significance of that gift but I did.

My grandmother never used the two dishwashers that came with her home. She’d wash each dish till it sparkled and then put it on the dishwasher racks to dry.

I don’t see that life has gotten any better since dishwashers. I think there’s something special about washing dishes. The time for thinking. The hands-on experience and accomplishment of getting from the beginning of a mess to the end.

There was once a time when a girl was checked out by her respective mother-in-law by how well she untangled a ball of tangled yarn. The mother-in-law learned a lot about the girl’s qualities through the session. Does she have patience common sense endurance?

I feel the computer is out of my hands. What pops up and how. And how everything can be lost in a second. Maybe I’m just being old-fashioned. E-mail is about as far as I’ve gotten and quite honestly I don’t believe I’ll get much further. But maybe I don’t need to. I haven’t needed geometry yet except to cut a pizza.

If I really needed this skill G-d wouldn’t have made me technically challenged.