by Lois Lawrence

Created on: July 23, 2008

Could an iPod be the perfect gift for a technically challenged senior? Absolutely!

My mother is about to turn 90 and lives alone in a small apartment. She has been a music lover all her life and my brothers and sisters have kept her CD collection growing over the years so she now has a respectable array of choices, mostly from the big band and swing era with a strong showing from the famous balladeers as well.

Any time she returns home from a visit at one of our homes in neighboring states, her first act is to go straight to the CD player and start the music.

Although she is not accustomed to technology and has extremely poor vision, she is able to operate the basic controls of her six CD changer. However, when I visit her, one request she always makes is that I change the music. We review what is in the machine and then browse her collection so she can decide what she will listen to for the next few weeks. Her poor vision would make it difficult or impossible for her to do this on her own.

A few years ago, when I received my first iPod as a gift, I found, much to my surprise, that my enjoyment of my own music collection increased immediately and exponentially. Before owning my iPod, I had listened to CDs mostly in my car and during dinner each evening. I kept a dozen or so CD's in my car and remembered to rotate the collection once a month at best. Even when I did so, I now realize that I was rotating only about twenty or thirty of my most recent purchases rather than really delving into my collection.

When I received an iPod as a gift, I was suddenly free to load all of the music I owned into it, a task that took about a week, but was otherwise a simple repetitive task. Not only did I load my own fairly extensive and eclectic collection much of which I hadn't heard in years, but I also tapped into my husband's vast collection of jazz.

I bought an inexpensive iPod cradle for my car, and one for my home and office. Wherever I go, I pop my iPod into the cradle, set it to "shuffle" and turn it on. Then I relax and wait to experience what I have come to think of as the oh-yeah-wow! factor. Filling the air and coming to me at random are thousands of songs I once cared enough about to purchase, but which had dropped away from my consciousness. Hearing them again is always a pleasant surprise and the experience goes on and on with amazingly little repetition. I also love the experience of hearing constantly changing genres, which change up the mood and pace at the office as well as at home.

It occurred to me that with two simple purchases, an iPod, and a basic cradle, I could change my mother's musical experience as well. She does not own a computer, but since she will be listening to only a small part of her collection for a week or two anyway, she won't miss the rest of her music while I load it onto her new gadget. After that, she won't need much instruction in order to turn her cradle on and off leaving her iPod in the shuffle mode.

Rather than listening to six cds, one at a time, from start to finish, she will have the pleasure of hearing Tommy Dorsey, Ella Fitzgerald, Liberace, Louis Prima and many others all in the same hour. Even better, the selections for every hour after that will be different and constantly new and surprising. For fun, I will include a few surprises from my own collection that I think will bring back memories of family summers long ago.

With that kind of unprecedented access to her own music, it won't take long for my mother to become a techie herself in her own special way.

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