When the battery of Alex’s iPad runs low an image comes on the screen that I’m sure I’ll see in my own mind in my last moments: a dark battery shape with a single thin red stripe, and beneath it all a lightning bolt that seems to say, “Just a little more time, please.”
“Daddy! iPad!”
“Alex, you’ve got to plug it in. It is dead. You’ve got to plug it in.”
“Got to plug it in,” he says, “plug it in.”
All he has to do is sit there and give up the privilege of walking around with the damned thing. Alex isn’t feeling well – hot and sniffly – so he’s just sitting there anyway. Sniffly is also why Alex has been sitting there with the iPad all day until the screen goes dark and the little red stripe appears.
The iPad, like so many of Jobs’s creations, sucks juice through two pieces of white plastic, one a white cord and the other a square box. I plug the end of the white cord into the iPad while Alex sits on the couch. He pulls it out because it doesn’t belong. Steve Jobs never in his life had a day like many Alex has had.
“You have to plug it in!”
“Daddy? Daddy!”
“Hey Ned, can you take a break from whatever you’re doing and show him? Maybe he’ll listen to you.”
“Why would he listen to me? Fine – I’ll just drop everything and help Alex!”
We’ve sheathed Alex’s iPad (interesting that MS Word keeps automatically changing “iPad” to “Ipad”) in a hard case of black plastic called The Defender, and when you want to plug the iPad or Ipad into juice you slide off a piece of the back section to expose the hole where you insert the jack.
Alex is 14 now, and though I could say to him “Expose the hole where you insert the jack,” I just tell him again that the thing has to be plugged in and turned off for a while to charge.
“Daddy daddy!”
“I’ll be right there, Alex.” I feel like another dad in another family would make sense of this and make it work. Alex comes up to me with the piece of the black plastic back cover still on.
“Daddy!”
“You have to plug it in, Alex. Watch TV for half an hour while it charges. It’s just half an hour. I can’t change the laws of physics, Alex.” This is my offer to pollute my household for thirty minutes with the noise of Elmo.
Alex returns to the couch. I show him how the hard thing at the end of white cord slides into the hole. He unplugs it again within seconds. You would’ve thought they’d taught him about this at his school, where they have an iPad.
“Maybe they have two,” says Ned. We don’t. Sometimes I want to give up and just think that it’s Alex and the way he wants things.
“Daddy, iPad!”
“Plug it in! You know what to do.”
The red stripe turns green. Oh yes oh yes thank you, let me suck the power. Let us all suck the power.
