Tixie 2.0

When I was eleven years old, I got for my birthday the present I had been begging and whining for: a tomato red transistor AM radio. It fit in the palm of my hand, and it had a cute little earbud so I could listen to it without bothering anyone. I named it Tixie because I kept it tuned to my favorite station, WTIX, the Mighty 690 ("Double Yew Tee Eye Ex, and We Loooooove You, Da Na Na Na Na!"). "I Want to Hold Your Hand" had just been released in the U.S., followed quickly by "She Loves You," followed quickly by the Beatles' U.S. tour and appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was a great time to be listening to AM radio. And I did. Once I wore out a set of two double-A batteries in two days. I made a little bed of cotton batting for Tixie and kept it on the shelf above my bed. I sewed a little case out of fabric scraps for Tixie and decorated it with glitter. I loved Tixie! [Imagine a paragraph break here; fellow Blogspotters, if you know how to get this thing to do a paragraph indent, please let me know!] Years passed, and I discovered FM radio sometime in high school. One day little Tixie just didn't work any more, and that was the end of her. I had moved on to "The Heavy Sound of the Underground, Double Yew Jay Emm Arr, Eff Emm!" [paragraph] Now, if I were eleven years old again, what would I crave? Yup. This year for my birthday I got myself the current generation's equivalent of Tixie: an iPod. Call it Tixie 2.0. As I like to say, why should kids have all the fun? [Paragraph] What I found particularly amusing was that when I bought it at the computer store, the person who sold it to me wouldn't let me carry it to the cash register. He took it up there and left it with the cashier until I got to the head of the line. The man ahead of me bought $2600 worth of computer equipment and pushed it to the cash register himself. (It was heavy.) However, I was not permitted to touch my $250 iPod until I had paid for it. It tells me a lot about how stealable these iPods are. I may not take it out in public. Do youth mug old ladies like me for their iPods? Don't answer that. By the way, I bought Tixie 2.0 a nice pink leather carrying case, partly for old times' sake and partly because I read on the Internet how easily these things get scratched. I also bought a $20 book to tell me all the things the skimpy little leaflet that comes with the iPod fails to mention. I was amused to note that the book had an inventory tag in it to set off the alarms in the bookstore in case you tried to slip out without paying for it. iPods must bring out the worst in people. [paragraph] At any rate, I managed to get it set up and figured out how to load music on it. Videos to come. I am telling you, I am not letting these 15-year-olds get the best of me. If they can figure out an iPod, so can I. And so far it's going pretty well. [paragraph] What does disturb me, though, is that when I tell people of my generation what I have bought, almost all of them give me blank stares. "A what?" If they know what it is, they say quickly, "Oh, I could never..." Oh, please. But these are the same folks who can't figure out their e-mail and probably the only reason they fool with a computer is that their grown children bought them one. [paragraph] Pastor Kathy's prayer for the day: "Dear God, never let me get so old that I won't try something new."