Free Why I'm Like This by Cynthia Kaplan Page B

enabling it to accomplish a new set of tasks and broadening the scope of its usefulness.
    â€œLook at this, it has twenty different functions, twice as many as before. It’s really amazing, the things you can do now.”
    And sometimes it had been simplified to an almost Luddite state of grace.
    â€œDo you remember how the other one had all those buttons and dials and you had to set it every time? Christ, it was a real pain in the ass. This one you just turn on and off. You won’t believe how easy it is.”
    Unfortunately, my father’s technological prescience did not always result in a step forward for the Kaplan family. In addition to a museum-quality collection, Calculators Through the Ages, our basement housed a whole host of devices that were not so much functional as hyper -functional; they were too clever to actually work. Recreational items often fell into this category. Lounge chairs that doubled as floatation devices, safe versions of games that aren’t fun if they are safe, science or craft projects that resulted in something completely unidentifiable. Occupying a prime corner of the dog’s room—that was the room in our basement where the dog slept and where my brother and I were supposed to hang out with our friends but never did, opting instead for the paneled den with the big color TV—was a drawing contraption made of liter-size plastic bottles that you filled with water and hungfrom the ceiling and there were some magic markers and pulleys involved and some string and you were supposed to be able to draw enormous geometric shapes with the bottles and markers swinging in various directions. Sort of like a giant Spirograph. I am probably missing some important part of the description but I can tell you, I saw the thing in action and nobody ever knew what was supposed to happen. Then there was the giant chess set which consisted of a shaggy chess-board rug, about five feet square, and a set of ten-inch-tall, sand-filled chess pieces. They were hard and large enough that if someone threw one at your head it could make you cry. This was not a gadget in the literal sense, but was, from my father’s point of view, a new way to play chess, and thus qualified as a gadget in spirit. I think he had a vision of my brother and me lying around on the floor, improving our strategic thinking while listening to the Archies. I don’t remember ever playing a complete game of chess on that rug, possibly because at the time of its purchase my brother and I were totally consumed with making monsters by putting rubber globs in a heat chamber. Now that was a good gadget. The only member of our family ever to use the chess set was the dog. He lounged on the rug and occasionally carted the pawns from one end of the room to the other in his mouth.
    My father’s all-time biggest turkey took up residence in our garage in 1979. It was a Citroën with a hydraulic system that enabled the car to rise up when in use and lower downwhen at rest. The intention was, ostensibly, to give the rider the impression that he was floating gracefully above the roadway like a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. He wasn’t. The Citroën was already so low to the ground that even levitated to its full height, you still had to crouch down to get in. It was a thankless car. It made my mother angry every time she saw it skulking menacingly on its haunches in the garage, and she was filled with dread at the thought of inheriting it when my father’s muse, Gadgetella, struck next.
    It struck all right but it didn’t strike a car. Sometime around my sophomore year in high school my father decided that what we needed in our backyard was a hot tub. He and my mother had long debated the pros and cons of installing a pool, and one day, on the umpteenth fact-finding mission to the pool store, my father fell in love with a redwood hot tub. He went home and made drawings and calculated figures and he came up