For most of my life I was a button pusher, fascinated by toys that allowed you to build, like Erector Sets, Lionel train sets that allowed you to both build and electrify with wires and transformers and as I went off to college, and discovered new undreamt of technologies, most of which I rarely understood. Looking back it seems only natural that I found myself drawn to the field of Anesthesiology which is replete with monitors, electronic equipment, gadgets, bells and whistles, alarms and the newest of new technologies – a button pushers dream come true. This fascination of gadgets extended into my personal life as well. As a consequence in about 1998 or 99 I found myself to be the proud owner of what was then one of the first handheld tech devices termed back then a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), mine was a brand called the Palm Pilot, developed by Palm Computing, a division of US Robotics as early as 1996. It was one of the first such devices on the market, and was later to be acquired by Hewlett Packard for a hefty sum of money and then rebranded as an HP device. What a remarkable device it was for that time. It had a calendaring capability, was able to enter, archive, retrieve all of your appointments, provide alerts for upcoming appointments, a multi-function calculator, ran several other small applications, and required only 3 double-A batteries. Later versions slowly merged with the emerging market which would become smartphones. But at the time it was the ‘cats meow’. One of the later models contained an early camera, an unbelievable advance for the time. And, of course, when the camera version was available I immediately had to have it.
I had moved to Seattle in 1975 following my graduate work at the University of North Dakota. How I ended up on the flat plains of North Dakota, at Grand Forks none the less, to attend graduate school – which culminated in a Phd and then to move to Seattle to work as a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Respiratory Diseases at the University of Washington is yet another complicated story in itself.
Living in Seattle, but still having family living in Northern Idaho, meant that Sue and I, and finally, after Christopher came along, Chris as well, would make the trek from Seattle to the home of my childhood several times a year – traversing the full width of the state Washington in nearly a straight line, a line that was as close to exactly midway north and south in the state as one could get – for ‘visits to the relatives’ – my mom and dad and twin brother Scott and his family, who still called Pinehurst Idaho their home. We would leave Seattle (nearly the Pacific Ocean) on Interstate 90 and never have to leave the interstate until we exited at the off-ramp at Pinehurst. Interstate 90 (I-90) is a transcontinental freeway, and the longest Interstate Highway in the United States at 3,020.54 miles (4,861.09 km). Its western terminus is in Seattle, at State Route 519 near Safeco Field(home of the Mariners, Seattle’s professional baseball team) and CenturyLink Field(home of the Seahawks, Seattle’s professional football team), and its eastern terminus is in Boston, at Route 1A near Logan International Airport.
Sue, Chris and I would make that trek several times a year and when Chris was young, trying to entertain him for the 6 hour journey was no easy task. Yes, by the way, there were times I was tempted at using some left over medications from my anesthesia cases to sedate him, but fortunately I avoided the temptation as hard as that was to do.
In 1999, when Chris was about 7 years old my mother passed, at age 82, after being able to live alone for most of the years after my dad’s death in 1977. Unfortunately, the last couple of years of her life she needed the assistance of a nursing home as her memory was getting more and more unreliable. However, she always enjoyed seeing us during those last few years, even though keeping our names straight was becoming an increasing challenge.
As the family began to gathered from various parts of the country to remember her life, brother Mike, from Minnesota, decided to fly in to Seattle and ride over with Sue, Chris and I to Pinehurst. Now, to set the scene, Mike was, and still is, probably the smartest of the Ross siblings. He went to college, and then graduate school, getting a Phd in Analytical Chemistry – whatever the heck that is! I had to take general chemistry, physical chemistry, organic chemistry and biochemistry in college in preparation for medical school, but must admit, never came across something called Analytical Chemistry. And I must say I was glad for that – I personally hated chemistry. Needless to say, most in the family considered Mike well above us in the intellect category.
Mike arrived, and the Seattle contingent made plans to set off across the state of Washington on a trip we really were not looking forward to for many reasons. In preparation we packed the car with toys, games, and distractions of all kinds to keep Chris busy as we knew keeping Chris happy would be key to making this trip tolerable.
We had made it over Snoqualmie Pass and were heading out across the high desert plains of Washington near Moses Lake the ‘pot holes’, when Chris started the old “are we there yet”, second verse, “when are we going to get there” song. As an act of self-preservation, Mike decided to get out a very large Rand McNally map, turned to the state of Washington, and had every intention of regaling Chris with the wonders of the state of Washington and point out interesting points of interest along the way. Interesting points near and around Moses Lake may be a non-starter, actually. As one can imagine, this was a tactic that kept Chris’s attention for what could be counted in nano-seconds (nano-secondd = 1 billionth of a second).
On prior trips across the Washington plains, I had gotten my PDA out – remember the PDA I described at the beginning of this story – to let Chris play with it. As I took the PDA out of my pocket Mike said, “hey what is that?”. Mike, as I said, was smart but not a techno-geek, so hadn’t seen one before. He laid the road map down on his lap and took the PDA into his hands and began pushing buttons to explore all of the features the PDA offered. He was really taken by the device.
All of a sudden Mike said, “wow, this thing even has a GPS in it”. I said, “no it doesn’t, what are you talking about”? “Well it does too”, he replied. I reconfirmed but in a slightly louder voice, with a few adjectives I had learned from years of living with my dad, that there was no GPS in the PDA. With that he said, “well it does so, and it is following our progress across the state with its’ own built in map.”
Having lost my patience with him, I looked over at Mike to finally straighten out his thinking. As I was glancing over it took me several tries before I realized what was happening. I was surprised and delighted by what I saw. Mike had inadvertently turned on the PDA camera and had the camera pointing straight down into his lap upon which Rand McNally road map was resting. This made it appear as though a GPS was running and presenting a map of the state of Washington on the screen of the PDA when in fact it was just preparing to take a picture. At that very moment I reveled in the thought that Mike was about to never live down a moment of utter stupidity as long as he lived.
In a less than a subtle way I immediately suggested that Mike remove the Rand McNally map from his lap and see what the GPS was then presenting to him. With that I also suggested that I was sure that Mike would be glad he had his pants on !!! Mike’s humiliation was only just beginning, however. Christopher was laughing hysterically in the back seat and so at that moment Mike had not heard the last of this if Chris had anything to do with it. For the remainder of the trip Chris would not give it up. Ever 5 minutes he would ask Mike if he saw anything on the GPS that was interesting. Needless to say the trip for Mike seemed much longer than the usual five and a half hours it usually took.
But fear not, the humiliation was not going to end that easy. We arrived shortly after noon and all got settled in at our moms small house.
That same evening all of the relatives met at a local restaurant, the Broken Wheel, for supper and time to chat. Restaurants, 20 years ago, frequently had paper place mats upon which the place settings for dinner rested. As we sat down, Christopher noticed the place mats at each of the place settings were very cute tourist maps of the local area, pointing out places of interest. I must admit, there were not many in that small valley, but the map was a noble effort to point out the few that did exist. The map included roads and mileage estimates to get to each of these sites. Chris slyly took his water glass, which had not yet been filled by the waitress, turned in upside down and placed it over the map where the Broken Wheel was located and then announced to all the folks gathered, “Uncle Mike, come look, my glass has GSP in it and it’s showing us exactly where we are”. Mike knew at that moment family gatherings would never be quite the same.
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