Apple Of My Eye

In the fall of 2009 my friend Amber and I stopped in at a Best Buy, looking at laptop computers for Amber’s boyfriend. We made cursory passes by desktops, examining them in the way that all window shoppers do, when we came around to the computers adorned with little glowing apples. Before Amber went to the job of actually considering her options, she paused a moment at the Apple kiosk and stood there, as if dreaming.

The computers contrasted sharply with the simple, polished wood of their display table, which further set them apart from the rest of the brands. Everything else sat on black metal shelves, secured by black metal arms so that no one could pick them up and carry them away. The Apple notebooks had nothing keeping them there save for a thin white wire attached to a sensor. I’ve never attempted larceny, but I assumed that severing it would result in a lot of attention with loud sirens and flashing lights. Sitting that way, it truly felt like having one would be no more difficult than filling out a credit card application.

“My computer’s so old,” she said, tracing a finger along the lid of one of the shiny silver laptops. “I’d love to have a Mac, but…” She paused. “I don’t want to become one of those Mac snobs.”

I watched her finger as it followed the graceful curved edges of the otherwise rectangular lid, and I felt that familiar stirring, like heartstrings but in my back pocket.

Gadgets, to this day, are a big draw for me. As a self-proclaimed nerd, I have an eye for anything with glowing lights or blinking buttons, and the attraction is probably best described as “unhealthy.” Right up there with sugar and a mild self-loathing, technology could be described as one of my major addictions. Walking into an electronics store, I imagine that the sight of me is something like a kitten plopped into the middle of a room filled with yarn, if the yarn was dancing and the kitten hopped up on speed. God knows how much of my income I’ve squandered on technological trinkets that, really, are nothing more than flashy toys.

How, then, does one admit to already having become one of those snobs? I’d made the switch to Apple computers a year or so before, and I felt immediately uncomfortable in that moment, standing there looking at several overpriced products I had lying in wait for me back home. I went from feeling ashamed, then, to slightly defensive. I certainly didn’t think of myself as a snob, and as we walked away I ran through all my reasoning for wanting things like these and the justifications for already having them.

As a child, I loved toys that lit up and had switches and levers and made science-y noises. I would pretend that educational toys — things made of bright plastics that were supposed to teach a child how to count or multiply — instead made excellent controls for spaceships or a computer workstation at a distant outpost. Things didn’t even have to be toys. At my great-grandmother’s house, I would play with her melodica, a handheld musical instrument that looked like the result of a flute and a piano’s wild night in Vegas; the rows of black and white keys looked like buttons that would fire missiles or close a bulkhead against an advancing army of mutant soldiers.

Years later, in the middle of a camping trip where my mother and I seemed sentenced to boredom, she and I drove into town to look at the local shops. We were in the middle of a junk store, basically a glorified indoor garage sale, when I stumbled upon an entire computer priced at twenty-five dollars. The find felt like a prospector’s discovery of gold, and, without prodding, my mother asked if I’d like to have it. Never one to pass up a good deal, my mother, I think, overestimated the computer’s capabilities. When we got it back to our camper, we set it up on the foldaway dining table and plugged it in. From school and even at home, I was used to having a mouse and onscreen pointer to navigate things. But this thing was from a different era. All the monitor gave me was a black screen. That and a lime green cursor for typing commands in what I thought of as the old-fashioned way. At twelve years old and a child of the nineties, I had no idea how to work a computer that had possibly seen its prime during the Kennedy administration. So I was left typing little stories onto the screen, only to have no idea how to store or retrieve them when I shut the thing off.

The computer was a disappointment at best. Still, the sight of it, boulder-like and bowing the dining table, felt comforting in a way that got me through the rest of the camping trip. It even outweighed the fear I felt when using it, when the thought of it crashing through the table and crushing both of my legs covered me like a shadow.

In high school, when I got my first job, I passed up the opportunity to go to London on a class field trip so that I could buy my first real computer. The idea of going to another country felt promising in the way that adventure does when you’re a teenager and your departure date is still far off. Partly, it was my parents who diverted my desire to go. The trip was in the summer of 2002, not even a year after the events of September 11th. America had forced its way into the War on Terror, and being a U.S. citizen abroad — to my parents, at least — was like bringing a toasty roast beef sandwich into a bear cage.

“You could go to Europe,” my father said. “Or...you could get a brand new laptop.”

My mother chimed in, her voice masking her intention of me never leaving the country or even setting foot on a plane. “It’d be about the same amount of money. And it would last longer.”

All the wonders of the British Isles paled against the glowing promise of a shiny new computer, and in that moment, no matter how much I might have pretended to think about it, I was sold. As a family, we made the trip to a Best Buy, the nearest of which was almost forty minutes away, so that I could make my first foray into the world of zero percent financing.

In the way that these things go, the laptop ended up being outdated within eight months, and within shouting distance of its fourth birthday it quit on me, essentially retiring into the job of a thousand-dollar paperweight.

By this time I had a little better income, and so I purchased a new computer, an Apple laptop that I would turn around and resell less than a year later when a newer, better one caught my eye. I had no justification for doing it. I’d just finished paying off the desktop I’d bought, and there was nothing wrong with my laptop except for the fact that it lacked a few features of the shinier, slimmer models.

Standing there in the Best Buy, I had to wonder if I really was one of those Mac snobs. And not just a Mac snob, but a tech snob in general. What other reason could there be for my attitude toward technology? Should a man’s worth be measured in flashy gadgets, I guess I thought I might rank a few rungs higher than other people. But, as we walked away from the Macs and toward the other computers, perched on their demure black shelves reaching onward to infinity, it became clear that all my toys really are are testaments to the fact that I don’t have a life. While other people are out getting drunk in a friend’s cornfield or sleeping around in the backs of sports car, I’m sitting alone in a sea of glowing lights and blinking buttons, waiting for my next toy.

Camper

When I was growing up in Brighton, Illinois, I watched as my father fell in love with the idea of camping. As a sportsman, his love of the outdoors was an exceeding one. Fishing, hunting, he loved it all; in fact, he might have taken to the woods with nothing more than a canteen of water and a blade had there been a permit for it. My great-uncle David shared his passion for anything outdoors, and it was from him that my father developed a fascination with extended stays in the wild.

David and my great-aunt Juanita owned a camper, and every so often they would take it up to a campsite at Greenfield Lake, just a few short miles outside of Rockbridge and Where The Hell Are We? Though I didn't have a lot of experience with these kinds of establishments, the first time I went it seemed slightly downgraded. I saw it as something more akin to a Motel 6 than a Hyatt, and it had a lot to do with the clientele present. My aunt and uncle got a free pass for the fact of our relation, but a good portion of the others looked as though they'd been pulled straight out of the movie "Deliverance." Pickup trucks abounded, most of them with attached trailers, empty of the boats now bobbing down along the lakeshore. Generic country music seeped from unattended radios like broken barrels left abandoned as dogs with names like Rascal and Cooter barked halfheartedly at passers-by.

The scene around everything had a kind of unspoiled beauty to it, except, of course, for the rows of eggshell white and yellowish campers lined up in a rough grid. Everything else, though, would have made for a nice, if somewhat generic, postcard. A breeze ran through the lush trees. The water glistened, golden with the afternoon sun. Empty cans of Bud Light lay half-crumpled and just a lazy toss from each fraying mesh folding chair.

After we arrived, my father split off to talk with my uncle and cousins. Meanwhile, my mother, my brother, and I planted ourselves at the wooden picnic table with my aunt and grandmother, who were sitting there with my cousin Tammy and her daughter Stacey. They all started talking as I looked around, surveying the place, already trying to figure out how long I would last if I made a run through the cornfields at my back and tried to get back home. After a while, what surprised me most was the overall quiet of things. Every so often one might hear a car crunching gravel as it made its way down the makeshift road or the whine of a little three-person fishing boat cutting its way across the water. There were no car horns, no trains or airplanes, and no television.

The silence was intriguing at first, but then as it grew longer and longer I realized that there was nothing to distract me. No video games. No cartoons. "How," I wanted to ask, "are you supposed to make the time go by?" It never occurred to me that this was the whole point of camping: an escape from the daily grind of work and life. What made no sense, when I thought about it, was what a person got in return. Sure, paper plates could be used instead of dishes, but there were numerous times when our family did that at home. And how was catching and gutting a fish easier than ordering a Fillet-O-Fish at a drive through window?

The answer came to me when Aunt Juanita invited us to see the inside of their camper. She opened the dinky screen door and we climbed up the two metal steps after her. Inside lay all the wondrous inventions and technological marvels that made modern life worth living, all conveniently packaged inside what amounted to an oversized U-Haul. My eyes grew wide as they gazed upon the two-person couch, the small-basin kitchen sink, the fold-away dining table, and (Lord, God, hallowed be thy name!) the television. To the left of the TV was a smaller room occupied by a short, squat bed just big enough so that three fifteen-year-olds could lie down side-by-side and just barely have their feet on the bed. But that paled in comparison to the television.

I sat down on the couch, relishing the soft, cool purr of the air conditioner and the warm glow of the TV. It didn't even matter that I couldn't explain the first thing about home runs or switch hitters, my eyes never left that soccer game.

Eventually my dad and Uncle David came inside, and when my father saw me sprawled out on the couch with my mouth agape, he must have mistaken my relief for enjoyment. That coupled with my mom's very interested examination of the midget-sized refrigerator sealed the deal, and by the same time next year we had our own camper.

I was eleven when my parents, brother, and I took a trip to a local RV and camper dealership. The parking lot reminded me of the lake, except where there had been grass now we had smooth asphalt to walk on; and instead of trees offering shade, I looked up to see a billboard promising guaranteed financing for a St. Louis used auto outfit. While the lot was nothing to scoff at, it was eclipsed by the main building, which basically doubled as a single massive showroom. Inside were open displays of all the latest models of campers and RVs. The concrete floor was covered in patches of fake grass to help sell the idea that, to be living in this dream, all one had to do was sign a few papers.

After making the rounds and looking at vehicles which appeared to be nothing less than mobile palaces fit for a third-world ruler, we moved back into a more realistic price range. Ultimately, my dad had the decision narrowed down to two campers: one which was nearly identical to my uncle's, right down to the "Mallard" printed in blue-green letters along the front, with the namesake duck flying beneath it; the other one was more or less the same, just a little longer to accommodate an additional set of bunk beds at the back.

After some deliberation, and under the coda of "bigger must be better," my parents walked away with one new camper and the promise of many adventures to come.

Our first trip out, we took the camper to Greenfield on a joint venture with my Aunt Juanita and Uncle David. After going through the lengthy maneuvering process of what amounted to a school bus squeezing into a spot the size of a Smart Car, we set up our plot with folding chairs and coolers full of soda. After a full afternoon of lounging around, snacking on the camper's stash of candy, I ate dinner, which was the haul from any number of fishing trips down to the lake. Later, as the sun set, Uncle David started a bonfire, and under the assumption that hotdogs and marshmallows make for a fine late-night snack, like stereotypical Midwesterners we ate again.

That night, as we retired to our beds, I listened as the first rumblings of a thunderstorm rolled in. Within a half hour the sounds had become a presence, rocking our little plastic box like an annoyed child with a broken toy. The rain fell hard, making a cacophony of noise against the roof and the sides of the camper. Things got so bad that my parents got up to check the weather on our own little TV, which we'd taken out of my brother's room for the trip; but the camper's antenna was little more than a piece of wire taped to the roof, and so none of the local stations would come in.

Finally, after a full twenty minutes of us not having died, my parents went back to bed. This left me huddled in my bottom bunk, built into the back corner so that my legs lay between the outside wall and the bathroom. Lying there, I felt like I was in a coffin, and when the next clap of thunder struck, I dug myself out of bed and went over to the couch, right next to the little room where my parents slept.

I fell asleep sometime after, and the next morning I swore that that would be my last time camping.

From then on, whenever my parents would arrange for us to go, I went so far as to stay home by myself. My father tried to dissuade me by telling me that, if I stayed home, I'd have to cut the front and back lawn while I was there. I think he expected me to relent, but he underestimated by desire to never be in a camper again. I gladly accepted the task of mowing the lawn in the middle of the summer in exchange for not having to spend another day kicking around a lake and trying out every folding lawn chair ever manufactured to see which one made a body of water most entertaining.

My parents' fascination with camping dwindled out as the years went on. I'm not sure if it was the hassle of hauling it back and forth, the arduousness of stockpiling everything one might possibly need for a weekend, or the frustration of setting the thing up. Maybe the luster just wore off after my mother and father had tried it out a few times. By the time I learned how to drive, the camper became nothing more than a shape in my father's garage, a silent testament to my dad's adventurous spirit and my lack thereof.