When I was just a wee sprite my family visited our paternal grandparents sporadically. I didn’t enjoy it because it was stressful and I know now that there was animosity between my mother and her in-laws for a variety of reasons.

Also, my dad was the black sheep of that family and his parents were vindictive. They frequently let us know in passive-aggressive ways that we were not as cherished as the other grandchildren.

Ah good times.

So it felt like we visited them more than we probably did. I would guess we actually saw them perhaps two or three times a year. Anyway, at age eight or nine I remember feeling like I should engage my grandmother in conversation. No one told me I had to do that and of my five other siblings I was the only one who sat with her.

A little background on her.

She was not happy in her marriage and that’s an understatement. For the last ten years or so of her life (during the time I sat and talked with her) she was zoned out on sleeping pills. Turns out she was hoarding prescriptions and had a huge supply. So large was the supply that when she was in the hospital for a broken hip, which eventually led to her death, she suffered severe withdrawal.

And she really hated my grandfather. So she sat in a wooden dining room chair with her back to him all day long and refused to speak to him. She just sat there in front of the doorway to the kitchen staring into space as she smoked one cigarette after another.

Hmm, this is going in a weird direction — a place I don’t want to be. But I feel like I have to give the background lest you think she actually sat chatting and engaging with me. I don’t know why that’s important to know. Let’s move on.

Anyway, I remember sort of planning my conversations with her in the car while we drove the half hour it took to get there. I think half the time I reported stuff to her which required no conversation on her part. But I do remember asking her this one question and what her reply was.

I’m pretty sure she was born in the late 1800s — she was around 90 when she died in 1983. So as a kid I asked her what she thought the greatest invention was in her lifetime. I thought she would say the telephone.

But she surprised me and said the airplane. She just thought it was incredible that you could sit inside one and fly through the air. She never really thought it was possible.

That was really bizarre to me, even though at that time I had never flown in a plane. I was certainly aware of planes and they didn’t seem like a big deal to me.

For whatever reason that conversation stuck with me and I have wondered what my answer would be all these years later.

It’s hard to say because I do remember a lot of new technology that was big and bulky in the beginning but became streamlined over time. I remember boom boxes, VCRs (remember Beta?), antennas on top of the roof to get clear television reception — I swear that’s how I learned about North, South, East and West — and microwaves, to name but a few.

I suppose I have to go with what most people will probably say — computers and the internet.

The internet has changed the way people live and communicate. My kindergartener regularly attends a computer class!

I remember taking BASIC in high school. I’m positive I knew about BASIC’s cousin FORTRAN, but I never ventured into that realm. I hated BASIC. And I absolutely hated trying to program the computer.

But then the Macintosh computer jumped onto the scene in 1984 and my love affair began. Man, I remember having to post files to a bulletin board in 1994 (and it wasn’t easy like email) so I could send stuff to a printing company without having to drive a floppy disk there.

Okay, so it’s too easy to answer computers and the internet. Tell me what other invention you think is the greatest so far in your lifetime.