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1bandar slot Ann Patchett: The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago That I Still Regret
Tee Minot, the owner of Christopher’s Books in San Francisco1bandar slot, wrote me a letter not long ago about the joys of owning a bookstore. In the end, she said that if she could recommend one book to me, it would be “This Is Happiness,” by Niall Williams. I checked the shelves of my own bookstore, Parnassus Books in Nashville, doubting we’d have a copy of a paperback from 2019, but there it was.
“This Is Happiness” chronicles the arrival of electricity in the small Irish village of Faha in 1958, an event that splits the lives of the citizens into the periods of before and after. “I think I understood too that I was living in the vestige of a world whose threads were all the time blowing away,” the young narrator says of when the man came to sell them fine appliances that could be purchased in advance of electricity’s arrival, “and some blew away right then ….”
I signed up for email in 1995. I remember the efficiency apartment I was living in at the time and the terrible desk from Office Depot I’d put together myself. The server was AOL, and when I wanted to check my account, I unplugged the jack from the back of my landline and plugged it into the modem, waiting for the dial up. For most of my friends, email came after cellphones, but I didn’t have a cellphone.
Cellphones were the worst idea in the world as far as I was concerned. My stepfather had made my mother carry a pager when I was growing up, and when it beeped she had to find a pay phone and see what he wanted. What he wanted was to know where she was, a bad habit that intensified after cellphones came around.
Cellphones were a means of making a person trackable. I wasn’t falling for that. The few flip phones I’ve had in my life died ignoble, uncharged deaths in the backs of dresser drawers. For a while I had a phone the size of a credit card that served as the GPS for my car, but whoever broke into my car took the phone, so that was that. I wish the person luck trying to figure it out.
Email was a different story. Email was mail, and I loved the mail. In my youth, I ran to the box to see if there might be an envelope whose contents would change the course of my life — an acceptance letter, a love letter, a check. What was email but the chance for more friends, more love, more work? I signed up as enthusiastically as the women of Faha signed up for electric stoves, with no idea that my life was about to crack into the hemispheres of before and after.
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