(HOST) During a recent power outage, commentator Henry Homeyer discovered that being without phones was one thing – but being without email was quite another.
(HOMEYER) I recently decided to face up to an addiction. My family already knows that I’m addicted to homegrown tomatoes, the sweet fragrance of peonies and the intense colors of zinnias. But there’s more. I’m addicted to e-mail and finding information on the world wide web any time of day or night.
I made this discovery during the big storm that knocked out our electricity and phones for twenty-four hours. Actually, we only lost the phones for twenty-three. When I woke up that morning, there was no power, but we still had phones. I immediately plugged a phone line into my battery-powered laptop and checked my e-mail. I sent queries to my friends: “No power here. How are you guys doing?” That was pretty silly, as most of my friends had no power either, and weren’t thinking about e-mail. Then we lost phones and it was like being marooned on a desert island.
The day was quiet. No phones to interrupt me as I edited my upcoming book the old fashioned way – with pencil and note cards. But about noon I started to feel funny. It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch. I wanted to check my e-mail, but couldn’t. Then I knew what was going on: I was going through withdrawal.
As a writer, I work in solitude. It’s just me and the article or book. Or so you might think. In reality, I’m constantly interrupting myself to see if an editor has accepted a proposal, or if someone has gotten back to me about the name of a plant. I use the World Wide Web to gather statistics and to lead me to gardeners I can interview about their specialties. But I couldn’t do that during the storm.
Then I got to thinking about my mother, who is now ninety, who had no phone when she was little. Her family eventually got a phone with a hand crank, the kind that depends on an operator to make the connections. When I was growing up we used a black rotary phone, which was pretty much all that was available at the time.
Now I’ve graduated to a cordless phone.
But then it struck me: in some ways I’m still living like my mom was seventy-five years ago. I don’t have a cell phone or a blackberry, and quite frankly, I’m not even sure what podcasting is or what MP-3 files are.
Of course, I’m a gardening guy, so I probably don’t need to know. But e-mail? That’s another story.
Oops, I gotta run – I think I just got mail.
Henry Homeyer is a gardening writer and columnist.