Slim Randles

When old Jasper Blankenship came to town from the diggings recently, we asked him over for a few days. He saw us working the home computer and asked about it, but he really seemed to be immune to its wonders.

But then my wife showed him how he could call up a certain program, tell it where he wanted to go, and have it zoom in from outer space to some tiny corner of the world.

Well look out now, boys and girls; we have created a monster!

Ol’ Jasper went from being shocked to being a semi-almost-darn-near technogeezer in about half an hour.

For the next three days, we had to wait until the old boy went to sleep before we could check our email. He was on that machine constantly.

But his new ability to eavesdrop on any place on earth at least led to some wonderful stories.

“Come here and look at this,” he’d say. We did.

“You see that tree right there? I killed a huge buck under that tree.”

“See this? No … this little cabin over here on the left. That’s where old Leroy What’s-his-name lived back when I was a kid. He’s the one showed me how to pan for gold. Right there in the creek. No … down a little ways farther, not that close to the cabin. Let me move it a bit … yeah, right there. See that big hole in the creek? Right there. Got a little bit of color, too. Not much, but if you’re a kid and find any gold at all, it’s a wonderful thing, you know?”

So for three days we took a tour of Jasper’s past. Canyons and creeks and small towns and even the homes where certain special young ladies had lived more than half a century earlier.

It was a fascinating blend of history and technology.

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Brought to you by Ol’ Jimmy Dollar (a kids book) about a man and his hounds. See it at LPDPress.com.