Yesterday I was the recipient of a spontaneous act of generosity. After getting up at 4:30 to tackle various projects, I spent two hours just trying to coax my MacBook back to life. The machine’s problems started in October and the crash yesterday was a harbinger of worse to come. Consequently, I wrote a frustrated post over on Eclectic Mind about my equipment woes.
Before long I received an email. I won’t embarrass the sender with specific identification, but it was from a person who has read my meanderings for years. The offer made my jaw drop and ran something like this. “I have this six-month old laptop that’s barely been touched. It didn’t fit the needs of a project I was working on, but it’s a good little machine. If you want it, I’ll send it to you and you can do some writing for this site I’m working on in exchange.”
Want it? The offer was for a machine of much better quality than what I was going to be able to afford and was delivered so gracefully, with such an open spirit of “hey, I can help with that,” I accepted readily and I hope with all the gratitude I felt.
Frankly, in the last month, my gratitude column has filled up in a way my often-cynical brain is having trouble processing. While I’m working to embrace forward motion and new avenues, my poor housemate is virtually grabbing on my knees like a child who doesn’t want to be left with a babysitter. Yesterday a friend suggested that R. is most likely afraid I’ll take off and abandon her.
Truth be told? One of my greatest joys at all that is happening right now is that it will allow me to live here and do a better job for her and for myself. I hate it when we bicker and fight. There is no way that my having an outlet that channels off the frustration underlying those incidents can be a bad thing. Physically, I haven’t moved an inch; mentally is a different matter.
I have realized that because my housemate had chosen to be a recluse, she is most comfortable when I am one too. The fact that she’s feeling threatened by my association via email with friends who live hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away makes no sense, but to her it is valid. One of the things she says to me often is, “But those people aren’t real. You can’t know them over a computer.”
How can you answer that in light of what happened to me yesterday? To suggest that real connections cannot be forged by remote means defies the imagination in light of the epistolary history of the world. A letter is a letter. We are simply graced with a means that allows delivery in seconds not days.
I am at my best when stringing words together on a page. The greatest fear I’ve always had in getting to know someone through correspondence is that when they meet me in person, I won’t measure up to my prose.
Today, when the package arrives from my generous friend, I intend to gently emphasize to R. that the sender and I would likely not recognize one another on the street and yet he extended a helping hand to me at a moment of real need with easy, open generosity. This place, this Internet; these words on the screen – they are not so unlike pen and ink scratching on paper.
Words, when honest, and hopefully well contrived, are all we have to convey who we are when barriers of distance cannot be overcome in any other way. He is not the only friend who knows me only by my words. How very, very impoverished my life would be without them all, these real people who come to me, God bless them, over this computer.