Writer's Bump

It is really odd when something that was so familiar to me is totally unknown by adults that are the age of my children. This phenomenon is becoming more common place for me lately.

It first started before my children became adults with the slide rule. My daughter was either in 5th or 6th grade when her teacher assigned the class to come to school with an artifact of the 20th Century. I thought that I had the perfect artifact, a hand-cranked cast iron coffee grinder painted in black with gold leafing. She refused to take it to school because frankly it was too heavy.

My husband and I struggled with finding a lighter weight example when it occurred to us that no one was using slide rules. I was a volunteer at UCLA and I suddenly realized that the huge slide rules that were hung in physics and chemistry lecture halls were not there. I don't know when they were removed, but probably with the pencil sharpeners that were in hallways and classrooms.

I knew where my old slide rule was. When I tried to show my daughter how to use it, I couldn't move it. It had been so many years since I last used it that it was stuck. A little WD-40 proved useful and allowed us the show our daughter how we used this device.

It was bad enough when adults with whom I worked had no idea who some of the rock stars of my youth were, but today was yet another awakening when I met with a doctor.

The middle finger of my right hand has been hurting for several days. Last night, I awoke with a throbbing pain in that finger. The top portion of the finger was swollen, hurt like h... and was hot and red. I was not able to get an appointment with my regular doctor so took an appointment with anyone who could see me today.

The doctor I saw today is a very young woman. I suspect that she has been practicing for only a couple of years. This is not a statement of her competency but of her age.

She looked at my finger and did see that I had swelling and the finger was hotter than the others. The side of my finger by the index finger was very painful to the touch and definitely was swollen. She was a little concerned about the area below the nail and above the first knuckle because it looked swollen to her as well.

I told her that it was my writer's bump. She looked at me as if I were a bit odd. She had not idea what a writer's bump was. So I told her that anyone who was my age, was older or was 5 to 10 years younger than me had a writer's bump. We had an interesting conversation about the writer's bump and why my generation has/had them.

She is of a generation who has had personal computers with applications for composing documents, letters, etc. with spell-checkers and auto-correction features. I even make extensive use of these tools because there are days that my fingers seem to do what they want and you can't read what I wrote.

I have transcribed records of events that were handwritten a hundred or more years ago and the writing in many cases was very difficult to read. About 1920 some records were typed so transcribing records became so much easier even though correction ribbons and write out didn't exist at that time.

Some bemoan the fact the "younger" generation is not learning penmanship, but what is the purpose of writing? To communicate! My writer's bump often hurt after writing pages and pages of a report for class assignment.

I, for one, am glad that writer's bump seems to be a thing of the past.

On Becoming a Part of History

The furthest thing from my mind was the possibility that any part of my family could be a part of history in my lifetime. Someone who is a head of state is a part of history. But we are just ordinary people.

I suppose I should have considered this possibility almost twenty years ago when my daughter asked me to help find an artifact of the 20th Century to bring to school.

It was the 1990s and I had some old stuff I had purchased from antique stores that I was sure would qualify. However, not much of it was small enough to fit in her backpack or for her to easily carry. I did have a cast iron, hand-cranked coffee grinder that was manufactured about 1910.

I used it a few times when I first acquired it, but the electric coffee grinder was faster and easier to use. To me it fit the bill. It was quite lovely, painted black with gold leafing, but very heavy. My daughter refused to take it to school. So back to the drawing board,

I started going through some boxes looking for something that she could manage. Then I spied a slide rule that I had from college. I hadn't used it in so many years that it wouldn't move.

How could something I used in high school and college be an artifact? Completely unfathomable after all I am not that old! My daughter had not even heard of a slide rule. She'd never seen one. Since it was lightweight and something she could put in her backpack, she decided to take it. My husband, with a little WD-40, got the slide rule working and showed her how to use it.

Neither of us could believed that we had become old enough that something we regularly used not all that long ago was an artifact. As shocking as that notion was to us, neither of us conceived of a day in which one of us might be included in a history book.

But now it's nearly twenty years past.

Last fall, my husband was interviewed by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. His interview is part of an oral history exhibit that the museum is creating. Forty years ago, he was a graduate student working on an interesting project. The students were having fun and no one thought what they were doing would make history.

Fifteen years ago interest in the beginnings of the Internet was just emerging. In 1996, Katie Hafner published her book, "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet." She interviewed him and there is a brief mention of him in the book.

Ten years ago, interest in the evolution of the Internet, again emerged. Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, at UCLA, waged a successful PR campaign to identify the beginning of the Internet as October 29, 1969. As a result, my husband was interviewed by San Francisco Bay Area newspapers and radio stations concerning his involvement on that date.

The fall of 2009 was a different story. Maybe it was shocking to people to learn that the Internet was germinated over forty years ago. It is so 21st Century! How can it be a product of the mid 20th century?

More people seemed to be interested in how the Internet came to be. In October, my husband became a mini-celebrity. He was incredibly flattered when someone asked for his autograph. He was on Cloud-nine after an Office Depot employee recognized him and asked to have his picture taken with my husband.

Several months have passed and he is just a regular guy again. No more requests for photos or autographs. But I am still shocked that my husband's voice, image and story is preserved in a museum.