New this year: the dates are lighter and there's more room between entries. That's the whole redesign. Delia says the page needs a picture. It doesn't.

On Tuesday Delia called me over to her desk to show me a new search engine another librarian had told her about. Two graduate students from Stanford made it. It says it's in beta.

I knew before the page finished loading. It's white. The name in colored letters, one box, almost nothing else. It looks like home. Where I'm from, that name is a verb, and one of the biggest companies on earth, and here it's two students and a box.

I typed a word into it. June. I got the month, and weddings, and somebody's page about their June vacation at a lake in Wisconsin. Of course. She won't be born for twenty-three years.

I had to go outside and stand on the library steps in the cold for a while. After a few minutes Delia came out with my coat and didn't ask.

Yesterday a customer asked me if a part would work with his motherboard, and I said, "I'll google it." He said, "You'll what?" Mrs. Wozniak said, "He talks like that. Ignore him."

Last night was the thirtieth. Delia came.

She'd said she wasn't going to. At 1:15 she was at the bottom of the stairs at Damen in her church coat, with a thermos and a folding cushion "for the bench." We sat there till three and passed the thermos cap back and forth. She told me about her husband, Hector, who drove a bus for twenty-six years and died in 1991, and how for a year afterward she set out two cups every morning without meaning to.

I said, "So you know."

She said, "I know about two cups. I don't know about benches."

Two trains came. Nothing happened. At three she stood up, folded the cushion, and said, "Same time next month?" I said she didn't have to. She said, "I know I don't have to."

That's thirty-one months.

Baseball's over. McGwire seventy, Sosa sixty-six. And they put out a new twenty this fall, with a big face off to one side, a little closer to the one in my wallet. Mine still has color in it. Getting there.

I told Delia.

We've been having lunch on Saturdays at the Polish place down the street from the library. Today she asked me where I grew up, and I couldn't do the thing I usually do, where I say "the Southwest Side" and change the subject. So I told her all of it: the bench, the newspaper, the phone. June and Hana. My mother. The boy.

She listened without interrupting, which I have never once seen her do. When I was done she took off her glasses and let them hang on the chain.

She said, "I don't believe you."

I said I know.

She said, "I believe you believe it. And I like you." Then she said, "Are you going to eat that pierogi?" and I gave it to her.

I didn't show her the phone. I'm not sure why. I think I didn't want to be believed because of a gadget.

That was a few hours ago. At five she called the shop to ask if I'd eaten supper.

I've decided it's the kindest thing anyone has done for me in thirty years: not believing me, and staying.

Last night McGwire hit number 62, and he hit it against the Cubs, so I watched it at a bar on Milwaukee full of Cubs fans who had to see their own team give up a piece of history. When it went out, the whole bar stood up anyway. Then Sosa came in from right field and hugged him, and the man next to me in a Cubs hat said, "Well, that's class," and bought a round.

A couple of rounds later he was explaining to me that the Cubs haven't won since 1908 and never will. I said, "They win in 2016."

He said, "Two thousand sixteen?" Loud. The bartender heard. The whole bar heard. Somebody down at the end said, "Is this guy serious?" and everybody laughed, and he laughed, and I laughed too, because it's funny. It's the funniest true thing I know.

He bought me a beer "for 2016." I don't drink, so I gave it back to him, and he drank it for 2016 too.

Saturday the iMac went on sale, and I took two buses out to a computer store in the suburbs to see one.

It's blue. See-through, the color of a swimming pool, with the insides showing, and a round mouse like a hockey puck that nobody can hold right. No floppy drive. A man next to me was furious about that. "Where do you put your disks?" He said it three times. It has USB ports instead: the same plug that was on the end of the cable I cut up to wake my phone.

I stood there with my hand on the side of this blue plastic computer and thought: it's starting. It's the first thing I've seen in two and a half years that's on its way to where I live.

$1,299. I bought a pretzel.

Six. Last night, in Utah. Mrs. Wozniak didn't say "that's that" this time. She said, "I'm going to miss this," like she knew. Everybody sort of does.

I've now watched all three of the nights my father talks about, in rooms full of strangers, and it's the closest I've felt to him in a long time. He'd hate that I said so.

Windows 98 comes out next week. Mrs. Wozniak says she'll wait for the second edition. I didn't tell her there is one.

A reader in Minnesota asked what 2026 is like, "since you're so sure." Fair. Here are some things. None of them are important, and all of them are true.

Everybody carries a phone that's a sheet of glass. It's also their camera, their map, their music, their bank, their newspaper and their mailbox. People look down at it everywhere: on the train, at dinner, crossing the street. The first one comes out in 2007. You'll want one. You'll be a little sorry.

The map in it talks. It tells you where to turn, out loud, and it knows where the traffic is. I hadn't been lost in fifteen years. I've been lost more times since March 1996 than I can count.

Every song anybody ever recorded, more or less, is in there. Every movie. You can call anybody in the world and see their face while you talk. There are encyclopedias anybody can edit, and they're mostly right.

A lot of the cars are electric. In a few cities you can get a taxi with nobody in the driver's seat. Rockets come back down and land standing up, and fly again.

And there are programs you talk to in plain English. You type "write me a program that does this," and it does, in a few seconds, and it's mostly right, and when it's wrong it's wrong with total confidence, like a brilliant intern who has never once said "I don't know." I used one all day, every day, at work. I miss it the way you'd miss a coworker you argued with.

The video store is gone. So are most of the pay phones, and the phone book. You'll have to take my word for all of it, or not.

I use the internet at the branch library now more than at home, partly because my modem and the shop's phone line don't get along, and mostly because of Delia.

Delia is the reference librarian. She's fifty-something, from Humboldt Park, with her reading glasses on a beaded chain and a jar of butterscotch on the desk that she says is for the children and eats herself. When you ask her something she doesn't know, she lights up like a dog that just heard the can opener.

Today I asked her, out of habit, how many people lived in Chicago in 1990, and she had it out of a book in about forty seconds. I said, "You're faster than a search engine." She said, "Honey, I am a search engine."

She's reading Cold Mountain and has decided in advance not to like the ending. I've started staying after my thirty minutes are up, to talk. She hasn't once asked me where I'm from. I think she's being careful, and I'm grateful.

Phone Sunday. After Mrs. Wozniak goes home I plug it in at the workbench, wait for it to wake up, and give myself twenty minutes.

I don't scroll. I pick five pictures and look at each one for a long time.

Tonight: June at three, asleep in her car seat with a cracker still in her hand. June at four on the Blue Line out to the airport, which is her favorite Saturday thing, forehead pressed to the window, waiting for the planes. Hana at the piano in our front room, with June lying underneath it. Hana teaches lessons at home, and June spends every one of them under the piano like it's a fort. The two of them asleep on the couch in a heap. My mother at her kitchen table, laughing.

June is four going on five. She starts every sentence with "Actually." She can't say spaghetti. She has decided that her stuffed rabbit is a doctor.

The battery drains faster than it did a year ago. I've done the arithmetic on how many Sundays it has left. I'm not going to write the number down.