By John Pegg, Becketwood Member
I’d like to share some reflections on how means of communicating have changed over the course of my life and what it has meant to me. I’m sure many of you will resonate with my life experiences!
I was born in 1941, so my early life experiences were from the early 40s to the mid-50s. My mother was an English major in college and so was constantly on my case about proper grammar and language development and she encouraged me to study Latin in high school (which I did for four years). Although I found it to be irritating as I was growing up, I have been grateful for that foundation over the years. I am also a natural born “leftie.” That reality was a source of consternation for my teachers as I learned basic handwriting skills. After many struggles, I was finally allowed to write with my left hand, albeit clumsily and uncomfortably, as I hold my pen upside down and write backwards.
When I was in high school, I discovered the typewriter, which opened new doors for me. I took a typing class one summer, joined by my best friend. That skill was a vast improvement over the “hunt and peck” method I used at first. My primary graduation present when I finished high school ready to set off for college was an Olympia portable typewriter. Off I went in 1959 to Colgate University, ready to conquer the world!
My Olympia portable remained as my primary written communications tool all the way until 1983, including agonizingly typing in triplicate one Master’s thesis in 1971 at Hartford Seminary. When we moved to Salem, MA to serve a new UCC congregation, I decided to join the electronic revolution and bought a Commodore 64 computer with a dot matrix printer. The machine was little more than a glorified typewriter, as the internet was in its infancy with access through a very slow “dial-up” connection (remember those!). The one advantage it had over the typewriter was that you could make changes in your text without using “whiteout.” As I also tragically discovered after writing my first sermon, its major disadvantage was that if you hit the wrong key as you were typing (which I am prone to do!), everything you’ve written disappears instantly.
Fortunately, computers have come a long way since then as has the internet and along with that, many alternative means of communications have been developed, including the Dick Tracy “face-time” IWatch (I don’t have one, but who “woulda thunk it” back in the 50s?). Of course, communications technology has taken a giant leap in the 21st century with the advent and development of “smart” phones that have made access to information and global communications readily available to people all over the world. With more computing power in the palm of our hands than the original computers that sent astronauts to the moon, there are endless possibilities for learning and communicating with one another. In the past two years, we’ve all become familiar with Zoom technology, whether we like it or not, and it has proven to be a very useful tool for communicating in times when we could not engage face-to-face.
Although sometimes it feels overwhelming and we all are frustrated and need some help, digital communications technology is something that many of us have come to rely on, whether for staying in touch with friends and family, or keeping track of our banking and finances, or hearing from volunteer organizations we are involved with, or keeping track of our calendars and scheduling our meetings. Digital technology keeps us in touch and on our toes, which is good for us as we age, despite the challenges it sometimes brings!
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