Precious the Laptop | Cathy C. Hall Writes

pexels-photo-160107 So a week or so ago, whilst cleaning under the bed in my office, I came upon a laptop. (To be fair, there’s a LOT of stuff under that bed, and the laptop is not the strangest thing under there.)

Huh, says I, that must be one of the Juniors old laptops, left behind back in the day. But when the Juniors happened to both be here yesterday…

Me: John, you see that Toshiba laptop? You left it here.

John: Nope, I know exactly where my laptops are and that’s not one of ’em.

Joey: Don’t look at me.

Me: Hmmm. I know it’s not your sister’s…where the heck did this laptop come from?

At which point, several things happened. John opened the laptop. (My, I thought, that looks like a pretty new laptop…) Joey astutely noted that Precious the Laptop is a Toshiba so my power cord would work. I remembered that I’d seen a Toshiba power cord in my closet (I feel like the whole world probably has a power cord in their closet so that’s not weird, either). We plugged in the laptop. And bam! It fired up!

It had Mister Man’s name on it. WHAT WAS THIS RELATIVELY NEW LAPTOP WITH MISTER MAN’S NAME ON IT DOING UNDER THE BED IN MY OFFICE?

OOOOooooooooooOOOOOOooooooo.

So we needed a password. Fortunately, Mister Man was a smart but rather predictable guy when it came to passwords. After the third try, we were in.

Now, it did not take long for us to figure out a couple of things. Namely, that this laptop was not used very much, and also, it hadn’t been used since Mister Man’s untimely demise. And though I sat there puzzling till my puzzler was sore, I could not figure out why the laptop was under the bed. Why did Mister Man put the laptop under the bed?! I mean, he did some strange and/or bizarre things in his lifetime, but this? This was beyond the beyonds.

Until, as I sat at the new laptop today (and do I need to add that once again, I’m having to learn all kinds of new stuff for THIS laptop?) and realized one important thing:

Mister Man would’ve had to get down on the floor and squinch between the wall and the side of the bed and carefully slide a laptop under there.

Twenty years ago, when that man was more limber (but still very predictable), he wouldn’t have squatted on the floor, squinched into a small space, and hidden a laptop under the bed. But I do know someone who sometimes goes out of town and slides Precious the Laptop under the bed so the boogers won’t get her.

Um…yeah. Apparently, Mister Man gave that laptop to me and I put the cord in a safe place and hid the laptop under the bed. I guess I figured that one fine day, when I had a little time and was ready to give up on Precious, I’d switch over to that Toshiba.

So turns out, it was not creepy at all. And I would just like to say, in case Mister Man heard me yesterday, that he was not at all weird or bizarre in his old age.

But I know someone who is. Pffffft.

So I love The Andy Griffith Show and this particular episode is easily in my Top Five:

I love the humor, I love Opie, and as always, I love the message. But it’s the tag line at the end that I love the best: “Well, you and Aunt Bee are having fried chicken. And I’m having crow.”

My crow-eating story begins when Youngest Junior Hall gave me his old Kindle this Christmas.

You see, I refused to buy a Kindle. I got way up there on my high horse and declared that I would not support Amazon. No Kindle for me. No, sir.

But I had friends with ebooks and they were on Kindle. And there were free books all the time, and they were offered on Kindle. So I downloaded the free Kindle app and put it on my laptop. That was showing ’em!

Except…I have trouble reading on Precious the Laptop.

I love Precious, I do. But she’s a bit long in the tooth. She weighs a TON and she loses her zing after a couple hours and…well, snuggling up with her in bed is just not conducive to sweet dreams and such. So all those books in my Kindle library on Precious the Laptop sort of just…languished there.

Unread.

Ignored.

Unloved.

And then Youngest Junior Hall gave me the Kindle. And we moved a lot of my books to that device. “Oh,” I said. “That’s nice, John. But I’ll probably never read ’em.”

“Maybe you’ll just use it for the games,” he said. “But you’ll have the books, for when you want to read them.”

“But I won’t read ’em,” I said.

“Whatever,” he said.

And then I had to go out of town for a while and I didn’t want to take my library books…so I grabbed the Kindle. And I finally finished the delightful Anywhere But Paradise by my friend, Anne Bustard. I finished it because it was so easy to read on my Kindle.

Yeah.

So now I owe Youngest Junior Hall one of his favorites. I reckon John will be having my world-famous mac ‘n cheese. And I’ll be eating a big helping of Kindle crow.