Jan 1984: During a lull in the Super Bowl, we watch enraptured as Anya Major pivets on her brazen, tanned thighs and shotputs a sledgehammer into a TV screen ten times the size of ours, officially introducing the Macintosh line. It is the first time I place a pillow over my lap in the TV room. Dad immediately calls his engineering friends in New Jersey to send him trade magazines.
Jun 1984: Mom quits her practice to take care of me full time. We wait for Dad to leave on a business trip to take a road trip up the coast. I navigate shot-gun with nothing but a stack of AAA maps, a ruler, and my mother’s talent to add and subtract integrals while going seventy.
Dec 1984: Dad is diagnosed with nasal cancer. Mom cries so hard on the way home that when he suggests we all go watch 2010, I don’t even mention that I have been waiting for months to see Supergirl. In the theater, Dad suddenly gasps and brings his hands to his face. Mom tries to pry his hands off his nose to see what’s wrong. He lets them down and we look to the screen. Roy Schneider is planning the mission to Jupiter on a flatscreen Apple IIc computer while lying on the beach.
Feb 1985: Mom forgets her purse in the car and I calculate how much it would be to buy our groceries on my solar powered calculator watch. We have enough change in our pockets to make the purchase.
July 1985: Returning from the oncologist, Dad finds an Apple IIc giftwrapped in the dining room. Mom tells him repeatedly not to put his face so close to the screen. He’s getting enough radiation already. While he’s wrangling with floppy disks, we find and throw away the last of his cigarettes. Through the beeps and the boops of the computer, we can tell he will forgive us.
Sep 1985: Helen Slater now haunts my daydreams on VHS. I spend an entire weekend at Phil Ascher’s painstakingly pausing and recording all of Supergirl’s flying sequences. I become fluent with the slo-mo tracking pad during the scene when Supergirl emerges from innerspace through a lake and does a stoic, mid-air ballet.
Oct 1985: I render Helen Slater in 3-bit pixels on the computer.
Feb 1986: Dad catches me watching my Slater tape. He comments that Helen Slater’s profile looks a lot like Mom’s when they were in college. I let Phil Ascher borrow the mix tape permanently. Dad’s charcoal colored layer inside his nose is receding and he lets me record its progress with measuring tape. We’re charting his progress on floppy.
July 1987: I stay home to play King’s Quest and see Dad install Apple Works instead of grocery shopping with my mom. A man fumbles while flipping a cassette in his tape deck (“Success in Stocks: How to Break the Rules and Survive” Tape 2 of 6) and hits Mom’s car on the driver’s side.
