Chasing the Horizon

The heat of the day was oppressive and the nights were even worse. If it was this unbearably hot smack dab in the heart of the country, I can only imagine how bad it is in the rest of America.

I secretly yearned for the days of the typewriter where I could feel my creativity sip out of my fingers through the steel of the keys and then embossed onto a piece of fresh white paper. Those were the days when life was slower and everyone could appreciate the smaller things in life. Quickly, my mind snapped back to the task at hand. The swirling sounds of my ever present ear sensor to my Apple iPad X12 remind me I was being pushed to meet another article deadline. “I had better get back to work.”

My grandson Gavin, who had grown to become a strong, driven and successful man just like his father and tall like his uncle had given me the Apple X12 for my birthday. He told me that he was tired of watching me meet my deadlines slaving over my old antiqued touch computer. Time had really changed my hands. These old digits had become less mobile due to arthritis. My X12 is very useful invention. I can’t believe that the inventor of the original iPad, Steve Jobs, had been dead almost 20 years. Wouldn’t he just love the advancements of this new machine? This amazing machine senses all my thoughts and converts them into words and places them directly into a word processor in what is now called the “cloud”. I am writing my new article just by willing my thoughts to be so. I chuckled inside, “no fingers required”. It can also read all my physical vital signs and the built in GPS tracks me so my grandson knows where I am all of the time. Today he was watching over me while I wrote since his mother and grandmother were out shopping as usual.

My train of thoughts broke again for a few minutes. I slightly bent forward and angled my head to the right. “Not there yet, I still have time.” I went back to writing my article. My source of revenue had been based on my articles for many years. I mentally questioned the content of my article, “Am I sure people want to read this one? Do they still want to know what I am offering? What do they really want?” Life had been so clear and uncomplicated back in the days.

The sun’s heat was noticeably less on my body and I felt the coolness of the evening breeze. Time had slipped by my awareness. I bent forward again, looked at the horizon to the right and the ball of light was setting. I then turned my head to the left and saw another harvest ball rising on the opposite horizon. “My deadline for the completion of my article was coming to an end.” I concluded my article with a simple phrase that wrapped up the symbolic meaning of the whole article with a little bit of humor. Little did I know it would be one of my last words to be registered on my X12. “Why Should People in Peoria have refrigerators? The answer was simple; sure, doesn’t everyone have a refrigerator?” A simple meaning it was.. we are all the same and not as different as people think. And with that it was finished and with just a thought it was sent via email to the publisher.

As I relaxed to watch the sunset the iPad X12 sent a warning to the main cloud processor that it was not picking up any more brain waves. Startled by the alarm, Gavin rushed out of his house where he found his grandfather sitting motionless outside in the garden, his favorite place to write, just as the light of the day waned and darkness set in.