During her morning walk this past Sunday, my mom slipped and fell on a patch of ice, shattering a major bone in her lower left arm and landing her in the hospital. Not surprisingly, a break this severe meant a long and complicated surgery that entailed installing a metal rod in her arm, held in place with a couple of screws. Of course, in this day in age, such a thing is common practice-- it isn’t until something like this happens close to home, though, do you realize how strange and surreal it really is to have a foreign object put permanently inside your body. What’s more, it puts a certain perspective on what it means to have a self and how that self is related to our physical hardware. How much of ourselves is replaceable? How much of the duties of the natural world can just as easily be taken over and done by technology?

Oh but I regress. The point of this blathering blog is actually the two little screws my mom now has in her arm. While I was sitting in the waiting room, left with only my brewing and bubbling neurotic thoughts, I began, for the first time at that point, to imagine what the inside of my mom’s arm must look like-- jagged shards and fragments of broken bone embedded in the surrounding tissue; a disconnected mess of a wrist, the future capabilities of which were dependent on a stranger’s ability to  perfectly wield his medical education and understanding of modern technology. But as I pondered this, I thought of the two little screws holding everything together and I realized that much of the technology being depended upon wasn’t that modern at all. In fact, it was thousands of years old, hailing back to ancient Greece, an invention of the notable scientist, engineer and inventor Archimedes himself. And once I realized this, I felt slightly better, slightly more certain that my mom’s arm was going to be just fine-- because something that has been valued and depended upon since 3 freakin’ BC must be something special, must tap into something supremely and fundamentally sound in its mechanism.

Such is the screw; the familiar spirally-shafted, threaded fastener we use to keep all manner of things together; a tool found in almost any industry and household, manufactured from numerous materials in a plethora of sizes for any number of applications. The screw; a tool with a name that says it all and that will, no doubt, continue to have a significant place in this world for many years to come.