ThinkPad glory days

Re-reading Dan Simmons' A Winter Haunting this evening, I came across a mention of an IBM ThinkPad, and it sent me down an unusually deep rabbit hole of memories.

I loved my IBM ThinkPad. I wrote a significant number of my articles on one when I was still a working journalist. It travelled well, it was small, and I could work on it for four hours or so during cross-continental flights between Toronto and L.A. or Toronto and Vancouver.

Of course, a lot of that had to do with the fact that pre-9/11 airline seating was much more humane, and you weren't in perpetual danger of having the person in front of you slam his seat back and wreck your laptop.

At some point I acquired a Vaio, which I loved. I wrote the first version of OCTOBER on that Vaio, as well as the bulk of Other Men's Sons.

My friend Ron Oliver  once kindly said that the Vaio was the laptop for non-Mac users who should be on a Mac (which was his unusual attempt at sensitivity, when what he meant was "Join the 21st century and get a fucking Mac.")

And he was right, of course. I probably should have paid attention to that fact years before, after the two of us collaborated on a piece of short fiction and learned, the hard way, how difficult it was to get an IMB and a Mac to cooperate.

Eventually I did get a Mac. I wrote both Enter, Night and October on a MacBookPro, and my Mac laptops are now basically extensions of my hands. I'm even keenly eyeing the "space black" 16-inch model, which is gorgeous, and which I categorically do not need...yet.

But weirdly tonight I miss my old ThinkPad, with the screen I tinted dark pink. It went everywhere with me on assignment from New York, to L.A., to Grand Manan New Brunswick, and even to Transylvania.

I suspect what I'm missing is less the Think Pad, which is a totem, or a relic-talisman (much like my beloved Filofax and my tiny red Motorola Razr phone, or my No. 801 Reporter's notebooks, or my tape recorder ) but rather the thirtysomething edition of me—the resilient magazine journalist who could write all night, sleep till 11:00 a.m. then get back at it no worse for wear, and who dreamed of being a fiction writer. The fearless, relatively unscarred, limitlessly optimistic guy who looked sexy when unshaven, not merely sweetly untended.

Those things, much like old model laptops, are replaced, as we age, by newer-model strengths and virtues—resignation, deeper understanding of fragility and a concomitant desire to appreciate it and protect it in others, forbearance, tolerance.

And the fearlessness is replaced by a kind of resignation that simultaneously understands fear and is able to put it in it's proper mental file—a much more secure and helpful place than he emotional floppy discs of past decades.

But man, it was fun remembering my tough little ThinkPad, both the literal and the metaphorical one, tonight. Thanks Dan Simmons, and for the fun ghost story too.