desktop of the hesperus

a short story about the binary and the nuanced, digital anxiety, and unconditional love

My mother loves watching old movies because she desires more than anything for the world to return to a dichromatic past, to be reduced to binary bits once again, as she imagines it was when she was young, an unconfused dichotomy of good and evil, bare and fruitful, here and there. Things were fairer then, in her mind anyway, because subjectivity serves to confuse and frighten her, and there is nothing more confusing than a panchromatic world.

The world was never how she imagines it, nor will it ever be. The implications here, of course, are that my mother is a certain person of a certain age with certain beliefs that is susceptible to all kinds of intrusions from malicious actors that seek to transpose her fears and ignorance into malleability, and these implications are true.

Most of all, though, she harmlessly wishes computers were nothing more than tubes and vacuums again. If only she knew the computers she struggles with are, like human beings, at their core reduced to two basic parts that become more complex, a layering of ones and zeros and zeroes and ones that eventually find some coherence.

“Now, can it really go there David?” she asked me as I wrangled cords to put her new laptop onto her desk in the position I could swear she just told me to put it in. “Because the cord, this cord isn’t long enough to reach,” she held up an ethernet cable, “It has to go into this tower right?”

The ‘tower’ was the modem/router, the same one my dad got when I was in high school. I’m not sure what the lifespan of these things is but it seemed like a Methuselah of a modem.

“Yes...well, no,” I said. “They gave you a laptop. One of the whole points of the thing is it has wifi and you can take it wherever. You don’t need to plug it into the modem to get wifi.”

“Why would I want to take it anywhere? Wifi...okay, that is like 3G right? How do I get that?”

I sighed, grateful my father wasn’t around to admonish her ignorance as was his custom. His absence (to go golfing) was a sort of Mother’s Day gift to her on its own.

“Kind of. Wifi is just...” I started. What was wifi? “Let me see if I can get it set up...”

“I couldn’t get any work done if I weren’t at my desk. I don’t know how they expect us to get any work done at all. Students used to call, they used to call me and that’s how I’d help them. No one calls me anymore! Everyone wants to message, they want to use the portal, they don’t want advice they just want what they want and for me to give it to them,” she complained as I selected their wifi network and entered the password.

Network: beautifulGreens92. Password: playItAgain123. Woefully insecure.

“That’s just how people are these days,” I said. “Especially younger people. Like me.”

“Is that why you never call?”

I ignored her because despite feeling guilty, the fact of the matter was I was there to hear her complaints, while my other siblings were not.

Hearing my mother complain about her job and its changing technologies and processes was an Olympic sport of our household. We exerted our sympathy with her at every grievance, because we knew she worked hard, frequent overtime and long hours, but we also knew that if in her position we’d probably be done with all our work before lunch and watch YouTube the rest of the day. No one had the heart to tell her this, nor to tell her she was likely one of the last human academic advisors ever, and she would get to retirement right before A.I. would swoop in and do the job she did proudly her entire life with three times the efficiency, accuracy and—knowing my mother—kindliness than she did.

“Now, let’s get these monitors set up...” I suggested. She watched me and pointed and feigned some level of understanding as I plugged in HDMI cables and changed settings on the laptop.

“There,” I said as I clicked Apply and, for some reason, the newly connected monitor displays rendered upside down. I rubbed the back of my neck. “Huh.”

“Oh forget it, hun, let’s just watch the movie,” she said. The popcorn she’d put in the microwave while I worked had reached a crescendo of pops.

For Mother’s Day, her grand request was that I come over and we watch an ‘old’ movie together.

There’s no amount of skepticism in my belief that this was what she actually wanted. It was not a situation where a young male has taken the easy way out by doing the bare minimum for his mother; I suggested restaurants in Albany (‘It’s not a good neighborhood anymore!’) a day out at the farmer’s market (‘Everything’s so expensive now, even there!’), a mother-son dance class (‘Oh please, do you really expect me to dance?’).

I could not force her to experience more life. She was already old enough to have experienced as much of it as she wanted, and decidedly had her fill. It wasn’t so much agoraphobia as it was contentment. She has everything she ever wanted in life: a nice house in the countryside, a husband who made good money, beautiful children with respected jobs who loved and respected her (even if only one came home for Mother’s Day), a vegetable garden in the yard, a leather couch upon which she could knit or read for hours, and a big crucifix affixed to the wall between the kitchen and half-bathroom.

Hoping she could change is futile. My siblings refuse to understand; they want her to be someone else, someone who will continue to grow into life as they do, who can understand and move forward with the same relish for life, as if insulted that the being from whence they came could be so ignorant while they were so worldly.

She will never change. It is the most basic prerequisite for getting along with her, but the hardest to overcome.

We watched whatever was on TCM. “Are you sure there isn’t something in particular you want to watch?” I asked. “We could literally find anything you want to watch and put it on.”

“All I need is my boy,” she said, patting the leather couch beside her and picking up her knitting needles.

What was on was a 60-minute feature comedy starring the Bowery Boys from 1955 called High Society, not to be confused with the 1956 musical of the same name. I wish it were the latter instead; 1950s comedy cuts with a dull blade.

My mother didn’t think so. She laughed like she was watching Def Comedy Jam of the 90s.

At one point a character said: “It’s a real wreck of the Hesperus in here!”

“What in the heck does that mean?” I asked, pulling the sum of humankind’s knowledge from my pocket.

“I’m not sure,” my mom said, pausing the movie. “Let’s ask Alexa. Watch this, your sister got me her.”

"I’m sorry, I didn’t get that,” Alexa said already.

“It’s okay Alexa. Alexa, can you please tell me what a wreck of the Hesperus is?”

“According to Oxford Languages, the phrase ‘like the wreck of the Hesperus’ is an informal expression meaning someone or something looks very untidy or in a bad state. The saying comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1840 poem The Wreck of the Hesperus, which tells of a ship smashed to pieces in a storm,” Alexa told us.

“How fascinating!” my mom said, unpausing the movie.

I had already read this explanation and continued on to the wiki page for High Society (1955), where I learned it had been accidentally placed on the ballot for Best Story at the 29th Academy awards, having been confused for the aforementioned High Society starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra.

“Let’s make sure we watch the Grace Kelly one next time,” I said when the movie was over. It was a short movie, but with all the fiddling with her desk setup and chit-chat, I had been there hours and I’d told my wife Rachel I’d be home by mid-afternoon to help prepare dinner for my mother-in-law.

“Before you go, can you help me with one last thing?” she asked, sitting down at her personal computer this time. I could feel Rachel getting impatient with me via text and I already knew what she’d say: your mom is a big girl. She’ll figure it out.

I looked over my mother’s shoulder anyway as she flicked the monitor on. She would not figure it out.

Here was this woman who vacuumed daily as though it were a form of cardio. Who chastised me for the crumbs of my everything bagel on the counter. Who made me make my bed, as a matter of principle, every single morning. Who taught me to wash and clean things I would have never thought to.

Somehow I expected this tendency toward tidiness to extend to her PC desktop. Instead, it was so end-to-end covered with icons of files of all kinds it totally obscured the lighthouse wallpaper and made me burst out laughing.

“Good god mom, it’s a real desktop of the Hesperus!”

She laughed. “I don’t think you’re using that right.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Aunt Janine sent me pictures from their vacation to Rome. She emailed them but I clicked Download like I usually do and it normally comes up here but I don’t see it,” she explained.

I quickly ascertained that the desktop was so crowded that the photo files were there but out of view.

“What we really need,” I said, echoing what she must have said upon seeing my college dorm room, “Is to institute some order here.”

A trick I’d learned from a coworker recently was that with A.I., you could ask it to write simple Python scripts to do pretty much anything. I downloaded the appropriate driver, logged into ChatGPT, and in no time had it write a script that moved Word documents from the desktop to one folder, folders to another, and PNGs and JPEGs to another labeled ‘Pictures’ and the number of Desktop icons was reduced tenfold.

I showed her how to access the photo folder and sort by date added to get the ones of Aunt Janine on vacation. She shook her head. “You’re magic. Thank you, thank you, thank you my son. How did you do that?” she asked, hugging me.

“Just a Python script.”

“Alexa, dear, what’s Python?” she yelled.

“Here’s what I found. A python is chiefly a very large, non-venomous constrictor snake of the Old-World tropics, belonging to the family Pythonidae. Would you like to hear more?”

We laughed.

“Well, however you did it, thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Try to put the pictures into folders next time so you know where they are!”

“How do I—” she began, but stopped herself. “Never mind. You get home to your lovely wife. Maybe someday soon she’ll be a mother too.”

I smiled. A child and mother are two separate bits, with something like the holy ghost between them, just as I used to be two bits until I evolved into the complexity that is me. Yet the simplicity of one binary relationship remains:

She is my mother, and I love her, and she loves me.

thanks for reading this story about a a technologically impaired mother. if you liked it, click the little heart button. if you loved it, maybe subscribe for more!

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BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:

How does the narrator’s incomplete memory of the accident shape their relationship with their injury?

How do physical and emotional vulnerability parallel each other in this story?

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