I fully realized the digital age when I first spoke to my grandparents over the "talk" feature on AOL Instant Messenger. How cool is it, I thought, to have grandparents that not only have a computer, but
know how to use it? What was more striking was that my grandfather, a man who never had much formal technical education, built not one, but two, computers from parts—motherboard, disk drives, hard drives, and so forth—with the help of my cousin. He has high-speed Internet access, sends and receives e-mail, burns CDs, and chats online using IM. He even built a computer for my grandmother, who uses it to check the obituaries daily on the Winston-Salem Journal Web site and does online jigsaw puzzles. She can no longer do real ones, as the pieces are too small for her to see and grasp.