The Mountain Eagle
WHITESBURG WEATHER

Kindle saves day!

Points East


In June of 2016, Loretta and I embarked on a 10-day road trip to Houston to visit our daughter, Genny, (Geneva Tesh), who had recently given birth to our newest grandson, Zachary (Zach). At that point in my life I was still reading on a 15-year-old Kindle. One of the first ever made, it didn’t even have a back light. I used a clip-on reading light, exactly like the ones I’d used on paper books. My theory was if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

I thought Genny was going to cry, and, truth be told, she probably did. But she took me to a Walmart the next morning and very diplomatically insisted she wanted to get me a Father’s Day present. We left the store with a brand new Kindle Fire. I didn’t know it at the time but my life had just been forever changed again. The only thing that has impacted me as much is when Loretta bought my first one.

Kindle has, for quite some time, been available as a free app that anybody who wants to do so can install on practically any tablet or cell phone at their disposal. I have it on at least three but none of them feel remotely like reading a Kindle to me.

Genny got me a new, high end iPad for Christmas because she knew my old Kindle was on its last legs and that moving from the old one was supposed to be like switching from a 1970s Ford Pinto to a 2021 BMW. The only problem was that Mr. Parkinson had become totally dependent on the Pinto and absolutely nothing else was going to fit the bill for him.

So I had spread the word that I was looking for a 2016 Kindle exactly like the one Genny gave me and I was coming up on the short end of stick after about 100 eBay searches turned up nothing. Suffice to say that Kindles have a very short shelf life and it’s easier to find an old timer with no back light than it is to find one with the much-easier-to-read-in bed device I had become so dependent on. At least Genny has far more patience with Parkinson’s disease than 99 percent of the people who have no choice than to let it drive them crazier than they are already.

So last Saturday, after the mail ran, I found a package from Houston at my doorstep that looked almost exactly like the one she had found for me five years earlier. Same size, shape and user friendliness as the old one, and all my books, well over 1,000 of them, were on the new device in less than five minutes. I was even back to the same page I’d been reading minutes earlier without trying to struggle through the glitches that were making it nearly useless.

Thank you, Darling Daughter! You have no idea how happy you just made your impatient old dad!

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