Invention

I've just finished going over a piece in a recent Time Magazine on the subject of modern invention. Funny, how I could read the words but understand so little. Devices already in the works seem so far out that they sound like science fiction. I got a good splash in the face of what our children and grandchildren will need to learn just to catch up. It's hard enough for me to understand even a fraction of the devices I use daily such as the telephone, the electric light, the computer, even an ordinary ink pen. If the world were to come to a screeching halt and I were left alone I think the extent of my inventive ability would give me the wheel, the inclined plane, the pulley, the lever, and maybe one or two other things. Although I watched my country grandmother make soap in a huge iron vessel over a wood fire out in her yard, I would not know how to make lye, and I wouldn't have fat from some animal, two ingredients she used, to even get started. No soap! What a world I'd have to endure if I were alone with my inventions!

Invention, in my family, concentrated in David, our second son. I used to say he got all his inventive ability from me because I don't have it. Someone must have taken it, and he looks guilty. He now works for a company that designs secret anti-weapons for the government. He can't talk about them, but in his childhood, he used to take apart everything he got his hands on to see how it worked. We let him do it after we saw he could get it back together intact.

I've lived through the first of modern computers. The ones that took up rooms. Now they've been reduced in size to peanuts or less. By the mid eighties most offices still had the bulky desk computers with a large bulging screen. I know, because then I learned how to use one when I took a job in the office of a retirement community. Up until then I prided myself to be computer illiterate. A word processor was enough for me. Now I have a flat screen Mac and I know just enough about it to do e-mailing and composition. It sits here like a modern miracle and yet my children and grandchildren use hand held devices the size of cell phones to match, if not exceed, the work that can be done with my Mac.

I am still an incurable foot-dragger when it comes to the modern world. I would not now give up my automatic washer and dryer, but once I did. Back in 1975 Wally G and I moved to southern Oregon onto a 60 acre ranch. It had all the amenities of a turn of the last century country place. Water came into the house gravity fed through pipes from a spring up the hill behind us. Although a large part of the acreage was given to raising hay, there was enough of wooded area to keep us in wood for our two stoves in the house. The exception to early country life was the electricity we enjoyed. Even that could have been supplied, I suppose, by something my dad used on our country homestead before the Rural Electric Company came in. It was called a "Wind Electric." If we'd had that we would really have been self-sufficient, except for our more seasoned neighbors who lived a couple of miles down the road and often came to our rescue. We lived a simple country working life, with only a Maytag washer (the kind with an agitator,) a toaster, flat iron and electric lights. Eight years were enough for us, but with a cow, a few sheep, a good watch dog, a huge garden and fruit trees, we proved we could get along without most modern amenities.

Invention is wonderful, I grant that. It's just that, for me, I'd rather be able to do without it. I think there must be a way to by-pass devices, simple or intricate, and work with mind alone. It's been done by a few in history. I envision a more metaphysical way of doing things. After all, a lot of those new inventions I read about this morning supersede gravity, spy into the insides of things, calculate beyond imagination, even read minds. The minds that thought them up and reduced them to peanut size or less ought also to be able to translate their capabilities practically in the physical realm also. I'd like to see what we call miracles prove to be simply marvels, totally scientific. Now that would be my idea of invention. Or might it be called revelation?