Let's See If This Works Okay

For the first time I am composing a blog on my IPad rather than on my laptop, an observation that is no doubt entirely ho hum for most readers, but is meant as an apology in advance for what I anticipate will result in stilted, jerky prose.  As usual the technology terrifies me; last night when I did an experimental run, the thing died on me; its last words were a suggestion that I join a chat room where I could find other wounded warrriors in recovery.  My husband suggested in a mixture of kindliness and acid that I should look at the instructions, but I don't seem to have any, except I guess something on the screen I can bring up, but that's too hard for me.  Just as when I am cooking, I want the text in printed form, its pages flat out there beside me.  My problems have to do with hooking a keyboard on to this IPad, and finding that everything doesn't work just as it did on the lap top.  Plus these keys are so small, and my fingers, those pudgy short little arthritic stumps, weren't made for the task.  Flashback to First Grade and Miss Emma Watkins holding up cards each with a letter of the alphabet formed in perfect script, balanced on the line, with the appropriate bits above and below. We learned the Palmer Method---little Charlie was letter perfect.  Flash forward to 1964 sitting in my office late at night drunkenly moving my pen across yellow lined paper.  I was writing a book!  The pen I used was a Parker 51 given to me by my mother in 1942; when the ink ran out I switched to a Parker 51 of indeterminate vintage that I found in the grass of Harvard Yard one day in 1953 and only broke my concentration when it too needed more ink.  In the summer of 1958, desperate at having yet to begin writing the dissertation, six  years since I had entered graduate school and long after I was out there teaching, I sat down to write the thing in long hand, then typed, and sent off to my dissertation director the finished product four days before my wife gave birth to our second child in November. Once approved, the final version was typed by me because I had no money for a typist, all 350 pages with two carbon copies, the top copy of which had to be on 100% rag paper and contain no error whited out.  The first two books I wrote with my trusty Parker 51 which I then typed into a fair copy on my IBM Selectric which had some kind of spooled white out tape which could be struck over errors.  Thereafter my ex-mother-in-law, a saint, paid for typing, which was an absolute blessing except for the time that a very vague and "artistic" typist went to the mountains skiing in the middle of a job, and could not remember where she had left the manuscript.  Then in 1984, I believe it was,  a lawyer friend put me on to something called a Macintosh 128K.  It took me two weeks to master the rudiments of this new technology, crying all the while, swearing, and tipping back goblets of wine.  Now many years  later, the author of many more pages, I cannot at age 83 write more than a shaky version of my own name with the ball point pens that litter my desk drawer. All the pages are on my hard drive and if I think of it, backed up on my Flash Drive (Richard laughs at me for having referred to it as "that little wand"), and now there is something called The Cloud, but let's not go there.  I've mastered and been forced to discard several different writing systems, their idiosyncratic system of symbols for operating each program as obscure and illogical as the ancient runes; only recourse to the chat rooms created by Apple users to dissect problems and solutions are sometimes helpful.  Imagine if the automobile industry resorted to this kind of obscurantism!  Now the IPad. Oy!