After nine years of service, my 11-inch MacBook Air laptop crashed!
It happened just after I had finished writing my piece last week and started to e-mail it, on deadline night, as I’m wont to do.
A tiny rainbow-colored ball popped up on my screen, whirling. I had seen that pinwheel. If it hung there too long, I would just turn off the computer, turn it on again after some moments, and all was fine.
Not this time.
When I turned the computer back on, the whole screen took on the pallor of death and, upon randomly tapping the keys in desperation for some sign of life, the shadow of a folder appeared blinking a big question mark. Funny, I thought it was I who needed some answers.
Called for succor, my editor gave me some computer CPR instructions, to no avail. My IT son dispensed further tricks, but still there was no response. When he came over and offered to accompany me to the Mac store in Greenbelt, I had an inkling my troubles were really serious. I had been to that Mac store a few times, mostly for embarrassing problems such as a forgotten password, and since I finally wrote everything down, I had not been there for a while.
After about 30 minutes of connecting cords to my laptop and disconnecting them again, not unlike in a hospital ICU, the Mac guy gave up and suggested we go to the service center in nearby Glorietta.
My senior card allowed me to jump the line. Looking at my laptop, while listening to its short history, the girl smiled at my computer before turning to me.
Vintage
“Ma’am, vintage na po ito! No more parts except perhaps in the US or Singapore, but, even with the new parts, I’m afraid all data is irretrievably lost.”
It’s 8 p.m. I’ll deal with that problem later; the immediate problem was my lost column. I had to reconstruct it from memory on Vergel’s computer, a much newer, wider-screen model he protects from my low-tech hands.
He set up everything for me and sternly warned: “Just type and save; don’t do anything else!”
Whenever something goes wrong with my computer, I am the usual—in fact, the only—suspect. He’s absolutely sure I must have done something I shouldn’t have, knowingly or unknowingly. With him, ignorance is no refuge; indeed, it’s the worst defense. Those who know Vergel know that, at both tennis and argumentation, he takes no prisoners. So, I do as I’m told; it is, after all, his computer.
By midnight, to my relief, the reconstruction was done. It had less to do with having a good memory than being honest. I learned the trick not from the writers who have inspired me, such as E. B. White or Joanna Trollope or Ian McEwan, to name a few, but from the least likely of them—the dark fictionist Stephen King, who warned in his nonfiction book “On Writing Well”: “If you begin to lie about what you know and feel while you’re down there… down in the jungles of actual composition, where you must take your objective one bloody word at a time… everything falls down… lying is the great un-repairable fault.”
May I add, lying also kills one’s ability to reconstruct lost stories. Only a truth-telling witness can retell his story again and again without straying or varying from the original. It is this same Stephen King truism that has made it easier for me to sustain this column week after week.
Did I remember his exact quote? No, I did not. But Vergel settles for nothing less than exactitude: “Go find it. Don’t just paraphrase it; reproduce it as is.”
As it happens, not only is the Stephen King volume one of the treasured ones on our shelves, his quote is also in the foreword to my own little collection of essays, “Personal Space.”
You see, I do deserve some credit, too, for a good-enough memory.
