Back Home Again

There's something about coming home again--but it wasn't my childhood home. It's my parents' condominium, high up on the east bench of Mt. Ogden, overlooking the valley all the way out to the defunct flour mill towers and almost to the upper portion of the Great Salt Lake.

I never lived here, but have been here many times since they moved from the big house three streets over . As my mother likes to say, they got rid of the big house before they had to, nestling easily into this one-floor, served by an elevator, extremely efficient, very comfortable abode. Everything here has its place.

My 84-year-old father tells me that one day last week he realized, as he went to bed, that he hadn't had to fight with technology that day. The home theater worked, the car was working, and the computer/internet was up and running and fine. I understand that one, realizing that all these things that make our modern-day lives what they are, have a cost: that we are required to be handmaidens to technology. For if we do not remain patiently involved, the system may go down. It does not care if we are frustrated, or if we are trying to get the gold-medal

performance on the Olympics, or if we have a deadline, or if we desperately need to go somewhere in the car.

Emerson said, "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind."

Oh, yeah.