“Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” he asked, reading either my face or my mind. “Giving away useful information runs counter to everything I understand about successful business practices.”

“Maybe . . .”

“Maybe what? Give me your insights. I’m not being sarcastic. You clearly know more about this than I do, so tell me what you’re thinking.”

I was thinking about the Fryeburg Fair, where Dad and I went once or twice every October. We usually took my friend Margie, from down the road. Margie and I rode the rides, then all three of us ate doughboys and sweet sausages before Dad dragged us to look at the new tractors. To get to the equipment sheds, you had to go past the Beano tent, which was enormous. I told Mr. Harrigan about the guy out front with the microphone, telling the passing folks how you always got the first game for free.

He considered this. “A come-on? I suppose that makes a degree of sense. You’re saying you can only look at one article, maybe two or three, and then the machine . . . what? Shuts you out? Tells you if you want to play, you have to pay?”

“No,” I admitted. “I guess it’s not like the Beano tent after all, because you can look at as many as you want. At least, as far as I know.”

“But that’s crazy. Giving away a free sample is one thing, but giving away the store . . .” He snorted. “There wasn’t even an advertisement, did you notice that? And advertising is a huge income stream for newspapers and periodicals. Huge.”

He picked the phone up, stared at his reflection in the now blank screen, then put it down and peered at me with a queer, sour smile on his face.

“We may be looking at a huge mistake here, Craig, one being made by people who understand the practical aspects of a thing like this—the ramifications—no more than I do. An economic earthquake may be coming. For all I know, it’s already here. An earthquake that’s going to change how we get our information, when we get it, where we get it, and hence how we look at the world.” He paused. “And deal with it, of course.”

“You lost me,” I said.

“Look at it this way. If you get a puppy, you have to teach him to do his business outside, right?”

“Right.”

“If you had a puppy that wasn’t housebroken, would you give him a treat for shitting in the living room?”

“Course not,” I said.

He nodded. “It would be teaching him the exact opposite of what you want him to learn. And when it comes to commerce, Craig, most people are like puppies that need to be housebroken.”

I didn’t much like that concept, and don’t today—I think the punishment/reward thing says a lot about how Mr. Harrigan made his fortune—but I kept my mouth shut. I was seeing him in a new way. He was like an old explorer on a new voyage of discovery, and listening to him was fascinating. I don’t think he was really trying to teach me, either. He was learning himself, and for a guy in his mid-eighties, he was learning fast.

“Free samples are fine, but if you give people too much for-free, whether it’s clothes or food or information, they come to expect it. Like puppies that crap on the floor, then look you in the eye, and what they’re thinking is, ‘You taught me this was all right.’ If I were the Wall Street Journal . . . or the Times . . . even the damn Reader’s Digest . . . I’d be very frightened by this gizmo.” He picked up the iPhone again; couldn’t seem to leave it alone. “It’s like a broken watermain, one spewing information instead of water. I thought it was just a phone we were talking about, but now I see . . . or begin to see . . .”

He shook his head, as if to clear it.

“Craig, what if someone with proprietary information about new drugs in development decided to put the test results out on this thing for the whole world to read? It could cost Upjohn or Unichem millions of dollars. Or suppose some disaffected person decided to spill government secrets?”

“Wouldn’t they be arrested?”

“Maybe. Probably. But once the toothpaste is out of the tube, as they say . . . i-yi-yi. Well, never mind. You better go home or you’ll be late for supper.”

“On my way.”

“Thank you again for the gift. I probably won’t use it very much, but I intend to think about it. As hard as I’m able, at least. My brains aren’t as nimble as they once were.”

“I think they’re still plenty nimble,” I said, and I wasn’t just buttering him up. Why weren’t there ads along with the news stories and YouTube videos? People would have to look at them, right? “Besides, my dad says it’s the thought that counts.”

“An aphorism more often spoken than adhered to,” he said, and when he saw my puzzled expression: “Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow, Craig.”

* * *

On my walk back down the hill, kicking up clods of that year’s last snow, I thought about what he’d said: that the Internet was like a broken watermain spewing information instead of water. It was true of my dad’s laptop as well, and the computers at the school, and ones all over the country. The world, really. Although the iPhone was still so new to him he could barely figure out how to turn it on, Mr. Harrigan already understood the need to fix the broken pipe if business—as he knew it, anyway—was going to continue as it always had. I’m not sure, but I think he foresaw paywalls a year or two before the term was even coined. Certainly I didn’t know it then, no more than I knew how to get around restricted operations—what came to be known as jailbreaking. Paywalls came, but by then people had gotten used to getting stuff for free, and they resented being asked to cough up. People faced with a New York Times paywall went to a site like CNN or Huffington Post instead (usually in a huff), even though the reporting wasn’t as good. (Unless, of course, you wanted to learn about a fashion development known as “sideboob.”) Mr. Harrigan was totally right about that.

After dinner that night, once the dishes were washed and put away, my dad opened his laptop on the table. “I found something new,” he said. “It’s a site called previews.com, where you can watch coming attractions.”

“Really? Let’s see some!”

So for the next half hour, we watched movie trailers we would otherwise have had to go to a movie theater to see.

Mr. Harrigan would have torn his hair out. What little he had left.

* * *

Walking back from Mr. Harrigan’s house on that March day in 2008, I was pretty sure he was wrong about one thing. I probably won’t use it very much, he’d said, but I had noted the look on his face as he stared at the map showing the Coffee Cow closings. And how quickly he’d used his new phone to call someone in New York. (His combination lawyer and business manager, I found out later, not his broker.)

And I was correct. Mr. Harrigan used that phone plenty. He was like the old maiden aunt who takes an experimental mouthful of brandy after sixty years of abstinence and becomes a genteel alcoholic almost overnight. Before long, the iPhone was always on the table beside his favorite chair when I came up in the afternoon. God knows how many people he called, but I know he called me almost every night to ask me some question or other about his new acquisition’s capabilities. Once he said it was like an old-fashioned rolltop desk, full of small drawers and caches and cubbyholes it was easy to overlook.