A magic little box

When I got my Iphone almost two years ago, the guy selling it to me said, “I think you are the most excited person I have ever sold a phone to.” (He had been selling them for quite some time.)

“Gee willikers! Would you look at this; it’s a magic box!”

I seemed that naïve and goofy! But I didn’t care.

I was really stoked.

I still am.

This may be the second item I have owned in my life - an item that runs on some kind of power source - that I can totally rely on. (The first is our Toyota. It has 265,000 plus miles on it and it still travels  500 miles each week, most of the time willingly.)

But the car doesn’t fit in my pocket. It can’t take pictures. I can’t use it to find a new recipe for turkey stuffing or what time the next train leaves for Stamford.

It’s rare that I would say that something I bought changed my life but this has. It is unlike so many machines I've known, the fridge that froze everything on the second shelf no matter the temp, the washer that went on strike if it had to wash a couple extra towels, the computer monitor that tinged everything in a pale green and took two people to lug across a room or the computer that said “fatal error” now and then just to spice up an afternoon.  

This phone, well, it works! That’s just the very start of what makes it so fine.

I love that my photos can live on it, that they’re all here: the people I love, the places I’ve been lately, the adventures.

I can type in a few words and have so many, many questions answered; I can check a calendar, calculate a figure, search a map, read a book and flip through a half dozen newspapers and listen to music. Call, text and write family and friends. (No smoke signals? my husband always asks.)

It has a yellow legal pad that never runs out of pages and stores everything I need to write down, from the reminder to call the furnace guy to work notes, to the beginnings of a short story.  

There are the apps that let me:

Listen to lectures around the world I could never attend

Try to hit homeruns on a funny little baseball game I uploaded for one of my nephews

Play Words with Friends with friends miles away

Make a movie

Translate paragraphs into Italian

Receive a haiku daily

Play a teeny keyboard

Buy a plane ticket 

Check the weather in Chicago and Florence and Watch Hill, Rhode Island

Carry a flashlight

Look up at the stars in the sky and then hold the phone up and see

what might be hiding beyond what I can see in that deep black night,

other stars, planets and galaxies.

Magic box, indeed.