THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!!

There have been more amazing changes during my lifetime than during the previous thousand years — and most of them are IMPOSSIBLE.

Take airplanes for example. The very idea that I can board an machine as big as a football field, and weighing more than 22 pregnant elephants, and then sit there having beer while it dashes down the strip and hurls itself into the air and take me to New York in two hours is crazy. THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!

Computers are also impossible. There used to be firm advice to young writers: “If you don’t live near a great library, move!” Now the worlds’s great libraries are cuddled here inside this amazing little machine on my desk. The idea that I can sit here and hit a few keys and send my nutty ideas around the world (Hi Ann, down there in Australia). THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!

When I was a kid the family telephone was a big black thing attached to the wall, and it was as heavy as a bowling ball — and if you stayed on it for more than a minute your mom reminded you that “Phone calls cost money!” Today phones are as big as a thumb and weigh as much as a butterfly’s burp — and the calls are either cheap or free. And now we have something called skype, which lets me sit here in Montana and visit with my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids in California and Nevada and actually see them on the screen. They can see me and I can laugh and gab with them, all for free. THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!

Then came Christmas and I got something called a Kindle. What the hell kind of name is that? They told me what it would do, and I responded “Bull Pucky.That can’t be done.” And then I went ahead and did it. They said I could load thousands of books onto this skinny goofy-looking little thing that is the size of a paperback book, but weighs about as much as three marshmallows — and many of those books were free! In one afternoon I requested and received more than a hundred books absolutely free. Now I can carry a big fat library in my pocket. Any time I want to I can visit with Thoreaux, George Carlin, G.B.Shaw, Shakespeare, Sinclair Lewis, Bill Maher, H.L. Mencken, Edith Wharton, Steinbeck and Mark Twain. They join hundreds of others who just sit there in my pocket until I beckon them forth. I like to read history books at night in bed, and most good history books weigh enough to cause hernias, but with my little Kindle I can read them with one hand while scratching something with the other. I got,for FREE, all six books of Gibbons’ “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” for NADA. This morning, while working out at the gym, I had a delightful visit with the late Christopher Hitchens. We talked religion. THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!

When I look into the faces of my wee great-grandkids I wonder what amazing changes they’ll face during the next few decades–but you can be sure there’ll be lots of IMPOSSIBLE things.

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FIGHT FORTH!