John Currie

While there is virtue to all of these things and perhaps if I had more money or a better, more reliable skill in these areas, I wouldn't feel at the mercy of something I cannot see. But I remember the days before phone machines when people just didn't call me when I wasn't home. Or at least that's how we viewed it. The rapidity of information brings with it, its own anxiety of connectedness. While I didn't avoid technology, I did take comfort in the old mechanical world. I was once of the last phone renters. I rented a heavy, yellow plastic rotary phone for a dollar a month well into the years people had bought their phones. When the phone company eventually ended this program, it was me a a long line of seniors who had to make our way down to a reclaim center and hand in our phones. None of us knew what we would do. On the way home, I found an old black rotary phone from the Empire State Building and used that until I, now, don't even have a home phone, having gone completely cellular.

I remember changing the TV with a pair of heavy, red handled pliers as we have brought the channel selector. This is certainly more romantic a memory. Now I think we are the only people I know who do not have cable. Living in the top floor apt. we get good reception from our "rabbit ears" and even get uhf channels which show re-runs of some the best sitcoms and cop shows from the seventies. I don't watch them, but it is comforting knowing they are there.

When the planet started to go so hi-tech, I began to make hand paper as a reaction, involving myself of one of the world's oldest, active technologies which has come full circle and is now a craft and an art form.

I wonder as the future arrives, will we look back on these as the good old days of wireless?