In fact, if she had her druthers, she said, "I'd have one of everything -- a cell phone, an iPod."
After all, she was the first person on her block in Wilmington, Del., to have an electric screwdriver, her daughter Nancy Caffey recalled.
Carolyn Layton, 74, whose severe arthritis restricts her to a motorized wheelchair in an assisted living home, keeps informed and in touch with friends and grandchildren via her computer and digital camera.
(Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
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Making the Computer Easier to Use: Seniors interested in getting comfortable with the Internet can be hampered by physical characteristics of computers. A sophisticated world of "assistive devices" exists, primarily for people with physical disabilities, and some of these software programs and systems and devices can cost into the thousands of dollars.
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And in the early 1980s, Layton not only bought an early Atari video game system complete with the first home edition of Pac-Man, but she played it so she could teach her grandsons.
Her joystick addiction ended there. In the late 1980s, she booted up for the first time after her son-in-law, Bethesda attorney Andrew Caffey, gave her an old computer with the personal finance program Quicken on it. She was an early Internet surfer. And she bought one of the first digital cameras.
Layton can spend hours parked in front of the flat-screen monitor of her Hewlett-Packard desktop computer, which sits on a small desk next to a twin bed in her small, sunny room filled with plants and artwork.
She types using the few fingers that aren't immobilized by arthritis. And she uses a virtual magnifying glass that she downloaded from a Web site to read small type on the screen.
She uses the Internet not only to keep in touch with her grandchildren but also to keep tabs on them. On a recent morning, she noticed that her youngest grandson, who lives in Maine, was on AOL Instant Messenger. It was too early for school to be out, so she typed, "Why R U home dear one?"
Through the Internet, Layton has befriended people she would not likely come across in person, such as A. Raffaele Ciriello, an Italian freelance photojournalist. She sent Ciriello an admiring e-mail and the two began to correspond about Afghanistan, photography and Ciriello's newborn daughter, Layton said. In March 2000, Ciriello returned to Afghanistan and stopped writing. Layton found out later from the Committee to Protect Journalists that he had been killed while on assignment covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Ramallah. "To think that he took the time to respond, I didn't expect it," she said.
Not everyone Layton has met on the Internet has been as friendly as Ciriello. She's tried chat rooms and avoids them. "I got all kinds of IM messages saying things that were quite shocking," she said.
A couple of years ago, an old high school flame named Gus tracked Layton down through www.classmates.com. He courted her relentlessly with e-mails, phone calls and letters. Layton was not interested.
"I told him, 'I'm not the cute little thing I was. I'm a little old lady with wrinkles and a motorized chair,' " she recalled. "And I wear a bib!" she added, referring to the swatch of blue terry cloth that she wears at mealtime to cut down on her dry-cleaning bill.
Gus replied that he didn't care. Eventually, she said, he got the picture and left her alone.
The experience didn't put her off surfing. Often she is reachable only through e-mail or instant messaging. Her dial-up Internet connection ties up her only telephone line. (She'd upgrade to DSL, but a brother pays for the connection and she doesn't want to be greedy.)
When one of Layton's doctors recently complained that he had a hard time reaching her by phone, she listened patiently for a few minutes, then asked, "When are you going to get e-mail?"
