The backstory: for my 60th birthday, friends chipped in to buy me an iPad, but Neil said he was a bit short—could we wait on it? He’d make it up at Christmas. Sure, I said. I wanted all the bells and whistles—the 128GB model with cellular, I was willing to wait. And waited I did—another year. And another. The promise of the new very expensive iPad meant there were no gifts from Neil for my birthday or Christmas for the next two years. None. Just an accumulation of iPad IOUs stacking up. I think he conveniently forgot about it, hoping I wouldn’t press it. Or that I’d buy one myself.
But my friends kept nagging me, asking if I finally bought that iPad yet. I said, but I only received about $45. Nowhere near enough to buy an iPad. Finally, Jane Bark told me how much they each had donated. I was floored. It was a full house. I did the math. Then it dawned on me, rather than give it to me, he had pocketed the money. Scottish, my ass. By then he had conveniently forgotten how much money people had given him, I’m sure.
And I had kept him in Macs and MacBooks that I had bought and refurbished, for nearly two decades. And here he was denying me my iPad. It wasn’t just about being strapped for cash. Something much darker. Finally, I had to resort to a screamfest to shame him into getting that iPad. He handed me his credit card, wanting me to buy the cheapest model. I ordered the most expensive iPad, the one that I wanted. The one that I had been waiting three years for—no compromise.
I loved the all possibilities within that iPad. Lots of storage, great camera, and the cellular aspect was brilliant, I was no longer tethered to WiFi. But it was a long and painful road to get that iPad. I had it inscribed on the back, In Dreams Begins Possibility—with a nod to WB Yeats.
A few years later, when the battery failed, I was devastated, but Apple replaced the iPad for $100. I was back in business. But by then, the iPad had become such an integral part of my work, I couldn’t imagine life without it. I was able to document and scan all my papers and memorabilia, including many of my poetry journals—which meant that I was finally able to flush out this blog, all those lean years began to fill in with blog entries. The iPad was an excellent archival tool, and helped me to create a literary timeline of my life’s work, such as it is. A retrospective. For that, I was grateful. I still used my headless MacBook Pro for OCR and formatting. But the transportability of the iPad was positively liberating.
I should’ve seen the writing on the wall. It wasn’t just Neil’s stinginess over money, it was a deep abiding stinginess of the soul. After Neil and I broke up in August, 2018, fittingly, that iPad was stolen, the following April 2019, while I was helping a friend who just had surgery, to the car. Some April Fool’s joke. We had a good run, that iPad and I. But karma fuck & damn the San Rafael Peet’s customer who took my iPad. I finally replaced it at the end of August with a 256 GB iPad Air 3—an expensive ouch that cost half what the first iPad cost. But friends chipped in to ease the burden. For that I am grateful. I am forging myself a new life because, well, In Dreams Begins Possibility.
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