The Bruce Scribes

Not a moment flies by, anymore, without some youngster tweeting, facebooking, instagramming, blogging and otherwise making a nuisance of himself in the permanently switched-on digital world to grumpy, old gramps.

As a member of grey-haired contingent, I have a word for this peculiarly annoying and highly contagious condition of cyber-connectivity: “Internetitis”. The the symptoms are as recognizable as the latest app.

Do you begin to sweat profusely if you go without checking your social-media feeds for longer than 30 minutes? Do you become anxious and fidgety when your inbox fails to notify you of unread mail? Does the thought of actually having to wait to check your voice messages make you physically ill?

If you answered “yes” to any of the aforementioned, chances are you suffer from acute “Internetitis”, the cure for which scientists are assiduously working to discover.

In the meantime, abstinence appears to be the only reliable treatment. In fact, going cold-turkey is becoming a verifiable thing these days. And it ain’t easy. Just ask Flora Carr who wrote a piece about her week without the slipstream of silliness for the Guardian last fall.

“I decided to . . see how I’d cope. Would my social life suffer? How would I keep up-to-date with news and trends? And did this mean I’d have to find my real-life calculator?”

Indeed, she noted, “I began to think of my week ‘unplugged’ as a kind of retreat. In a world saturated with images, we feel a need to document our every action; just recently I caught myself Instagramming my bowl of morning porridge.

“As the week progressed I found myself sleeping far better – simply because I wasn’t lying in bed for hours double-checking my newsfeed. . . And while the week may have provided me an escape from both hypothermia and Kim Kardashian taking 1,200 selfies on holiday, it also proved to be a period of self-imposed social exile.”

That is, of course, the point.

I grew up at a time when rotary dial telephones were actually considered intrusive by many of my parents’ generation. The thought of any single household owning more than one of these contraptions was patently absurd. When you rang someone up, there was an even chance your call would go unanswered. You’d just have to try later or even (gasp!) the following day.

Somehow, though, we managed to muddle through without compromising the integrity of our circles of friends and associates. We actually looked forward to receiving a bone fide letter in the mail.

Then again, if you’ve never lived this way, the sudden withdrawal from the plugged in world can be jarring. That’s what American technology writer Paul Miller discovered a couple of years ago when he decided tune out for an entire year. In an interview with CNN, upon his return to the online universe, he described his experience as,“Existential and introspective. I really learned a lot about myself. I did have a lot of free time, but a lot of it was loneliness and boredom in ways that I hadn’t really experienced before.”

On the other hand, he said, “There were times I would realize my mind was in really cool places, having thought processes that are hard to have when you’re on the Internet.”

Would he do it again?

Something tells me the 20-something would rather be caught naked on a busy overpass than to be one more minute without his smartphone.

After all, Luddite Town is a nice place to visit, but, really gramps, who would want to live there?

I refuse to remember what I ate for supper last Thursday, but, as I drift off to sleep, certain in my bedroll, I do recall with perfect clarity the summer between my 11^th and 12^th birthdays.

There, on the South Shore of Nova Scotia in a subdivision called Pinedale Park, just minutes away from the pretty promontory known as Prospect, my younger sister and I would gambol along the shoreline for hours, picking periwinkles from seaweed, diving headlong into the surf, spearing rock eels with straightened, sharpened clothes hangars.

In the spring of 1971, my father took me to the boat show in Halifax, just 45 minutes up the road. He was thinking about a sailing ship for himself. Not finding one that suited him, he set his sites on a double-hulled skiff, equipped with a tiller, rudder, centerboard and something that actually looked like a mainsail and mast.

He presented it to me as a gift even as the ice flows clogged the moorings in the bay; I took to it like a fish does to water. I was a better sailor then than I am now, having spent a good deal of time, since age three, tacking about in Toronto Harbour with my mother’s brother and, of course, dear, old Dad.

For two months in the summer of 1971, I would drive that skiff into the swells off the coast where the grumbling of the pounding water would tell me where to make landfall and where not to afford an attempt. I would take my tiny girlfriends right across the bay to the far shore, where, God knows, anything could happen away from prying, adult eyes – even a bubble-gum kiss or three.

Once, when my craft was docked, I jumped into an open-bodied ketch of nearly 20 feet, from stem to stern, that my father had finally managed to procure from a broker in England. We sailed into the North Atlantic, under mariner’s skies. I manned the jib. Dad handled the tiller and mainsail. We tacked and jibed until the sun told us that it was time to head into Prospect.

As we ran with the wind, my father began to fiddle with the centerboard’s main line, which held the heavy, lead cleaver that served as the boat’s moveable keel. When the bloody thing slammed down, it took half of the middle finger on his right hand with it.

It occurs to me now that had we been equipped with GPS and cell-phone technology, we might have been able to rescue ourselves from certain perdition. As it was, with no tech available in the early 1970s, five miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, it was clear we were on our own. Dad, his wrecked finger dangling from his mouth, somehow started the outboard engine. I grabbed the tiller and cruised that craft to port.

I don’t remember what I ate for supper that night. I do remember the bandage my father sported after his return from the Halifax Infirmary. And I remember something else.

I remember my 38-year-old pater, hail and hardy, standing on the stoop of our Pinedale Park ranch-style bungalow, waving to me with his good hand. “That was something,” he said through the pain and the painkillers. “You know, of course, you helped me.”

The next day, my sister and I headed down to the shore to hunt for periwinkles and eels.

Just in that fragile tissue of life, lived in a moment of summertime, when the days are longer than anyone deserves, we knew we could do anything.