I installed Microsoft Outlook on my laptop recently so I could sync it with my Blackberry. Outlook is a memory hog, so it was causing my computer to run super slow. I decided that I needed to double my RAM, so I packed up my laptop on Saturday and jumped into my car. I knew where I was going to go—a little computer fix-it shop called Computers To Go. Late in my Dad’s life, he got involved in computers and more than once we’d hit Computers To Go on a lazy Saturday afternoon just to see what they had to offer. He liked the place and trusted the guys who ran it.
I haven’t been to that store since Dad died nearly seven years ago. As I pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall where the store is located, I remembered another place we used to hang out on occasion. Once a month, a bunch of local computer retailers would hold a computer show in a community center and Dad and I attended it three or four times. Sometimes we’d come home with floppy disks (remember those?) or some software program that we’d been eyeballing for a while. But mostly we just looked and talked, both to each other and to various vendors.
During one computer show (probably in 1999), shortly after I started writing for publication, I was thinking about purchasing my first laptop computer. I didn’t know much about laptops at the time. I just knew that I wanted it to come with Microsoft Word since that’s what most publishers expected writers to use. As you probably remember, laptops were extremely expensive back then and I figured I wouldn’t be able to afford one for quite a while. My PC worked just fine, but Dad was thinking long term.
We saw a table with laptops on it and we both stopped there to toy around with them. Dad started asking the vendor about the specifications. The laptops were refurbished and weren’t anywhere near the latest in technology. Dad and the vendor went back and forth on a price for one of the machines and before I knew it, Dad pulled me aside and put three hundred dollars into my hands and told me that I should buy the laptop he’d been talking to the vendor about.
I went back and asked the vendor some more questions. The laptop didn’t come with much software and it didn’t come with Microsoft Word (which was several hundred dollars at the time if you bought it new). I talked to Dad about it a little more and he agreed that it might be best if we didn’t get the machine because it was so old and didn’t have what I needed. I thanked him profusely though because I know that he didn’t have much money at the time. Looking back now, I realize that he might have been offering me everything he had.
With that in mind, you can imagine how difficult it was for me to walk into the Computers To Go store this past weekend without him. They were busy, but I bought some RAM and as one of the guys was installing it, I asked him if he remembered my Dad. He didn’t, but said he might if he saw him. I thanked him for their service (which was excellent—Dad was right) and drove home, thankful for the gift of memories.
