Archive for March 30th, 2009

This is really hard for me to believe, but this morning when I was in my son’s room, trying to help him find some uniform trousers, I saw the Apple laptop on his dresser, under a pile of what can fairly be called teenaged boy room garbage – a mixture of dirty clothes, cheese stick wrappers, unused school books, and clean clothes.

“What is my computer doing in here?” I asked him.

“It’s been in here for a while. I was using it to watch movies.”

“Don’t you realize it’s dead?” I opened the screen. And the screen flickered and lit up, in the midst of using the Apple DVD player.

“It’s alive!” I cried.

My son shrugged. I don’t think he ever realized it was gone. He gave me the power cord, which he’d repaired with black electric tape after it was attacked by the puppies. Was that the problem? Something as simple as the power cord? I didn’t think so, and yet, I had to admit: I have no explanation for this recovery.

It lives! I’m typing on it right now. And as a result of this rebirth, all the worries that I had about health, about money, suddenly seem as ephemeral and foolish as my conviction that the Apple Laptop was ready for the landfill. It seems symbolic of something–not just spring, not just that I don’t really know everything, but that miracles can occur. All my negative thoughts, all my worries and conjectures about Bad Things, they’re all completely empty in the face of the miraculous. It’s almost as if I can hear a deep, disembodied voice repeating behind me,

“I fixed the laptop, oh you of little faith.”