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1 My father sits next to me
1 from a thousand miles away,
1 telling me about being a Vietnam-era
0
1 Veteran of Jacksonville, Florida.
1 One week on leave he rode
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1 down south with just the know-how
1 to fix a muffler with a coat hanger.
1 He found his way to St. Pete
1 Beach and a girl dressed
0
1 to the Seventies for him.
1 But her brother had something more interesting.
0
1 It was the oldest of computer technology;
1 a memory card, two feet
0
1 long, and one foot thick, covered with wires,
0
1 in need of a room-sized computer
0
0
1 to do its thinking. It could store
1 a single, imageless program
0
0
1 in ones and zeros.
0
0
1 These days, my father keeps a Palm Pilot
1 on his hip to store all his phone numbers,
1 his schedule, and his daily journal.
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1 His pocket brain can process more
1 information in one second
0
0
1 than the NASA memory cards
0
1 could handle in a year.
0
0
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1 My father can’t remember the face of that
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1 Seventies girl, whether her
0
0
1 brunette
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1 blonde
0
0
0
1 red
1 hair was up or down,
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1 but he remembers Florida
0
0
1 through a space-aged box,
1 two feet long
1 one foot thick,
0
0
1 filled with ones
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0
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1 and zeros.
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All work on this site (writing and illustrations) are copyright 2003, Iz Church |
