The Damnedest Thing

I'm going to tell you about something. It's the damnedest thing. Most people probably don't even think it's the damnedest thing, because they've gotten used to it, and I'm sorry for them. They've gone way past being thrilled with the orange in the Christmas stocking and are all the way up to being bored to tears with the mound of whizbang toys under the tree. But this is the damnedest thing.

Not all that long ago if you had a baby, nobody knew about it except the folks in your cave, or the next farmstead over. Maybe some of your family took off for the hinterlands years ago and you're lucky if you ever get a letter, scrawled out by candlelight and stuck hopefully in a passing saddlebag. You might not even want to write to them about your new baby because by the time they

get the letter it could have been taken by the yellow fever, or one of the other colored fevers.

Even at the time I was born, and for quite a few decades after, people had to wait for the baby to hit air before anyone knew a thing about it. First thing anyone said, including the woman who'd been harboring it all those months, was "what is it?" Like maybe it could have been a badger or a hamster or something. Oh, some busybody might have made pronouncements about the nature of the baby in utero by dangling a threaded needle over it, and declaring it was a boy if it swung in a straight line, or a girl if it swung in a circle, but that's totally in Ouija territory, and just as accurate. Mom would send out a batch of pastel greeting cards to her home-town friends with a big-eyed baby painted on the front and "It's a girl!" or "It's a boy!" printed inside, and the closer family members would get a black and white photograph tucked inside too, of a squinty and irritable-looking critter that in no way resembled the adorable infant on the front.

Yes, every now and then, but not that often, the question "what is it?" would be answered with a rumpled smile and a quirked eyebrow, because the answer was complicated and not that clear, and the infant would be handed back to the doctor with the instruction to "make it regular," and there would be decisions and incisions, and maybe everything would work out, but not always. Hallmark failed to produce cards that proclaimed "We don't know what it is!" But maybe they do now. Things is diff'rent.

Still, when I was born, mail service was quick and cheap, and Grandma and the relatives could rely on getting updates throughout the year and maybe another photograph at Christmas, but nobody expected to be kept apprised of all the details. That is how a child who would be over the moon to receive a stuffed animal, any stuffed animal, kept getting dolls and sweater sets from the aunts. Not enough information. But that's just the way it was.

These days, there is nothing on this planet that doesn't fit in our pockets. Not for Dave and me--we're back'ards. We're not as smart as our phones and we get back at them by leaving them behind most of the time. We live in a constant state of underinformation that would quake a younger soul. But let me tell you about this thing. 

There we are on a mountain. We've hiked eight miles in from the nearest road. We're peering over a ledge into a ravine at a river that threads all the way down from a glacier in a mighty peak, and there's a tweedling coming out of Dave's shorts, and it is a photo of our niece and her brand new baby, her beautiful much-anticipated much hoped-for actual baby girl, in pixels shot through the ether from a thousand miles away and reassembled in Dave's phone in the wilderness, and we burst into tears at all the beauty, and all I'm saying is no matter what you think, that is the damnedest thing. It is.

And My Number Is 634-5789

Picture the Amish gentlewoman at Sears, looking over the Kenmore dryers, her face etched in regret and resignation, deeply suspicious that her purchase might cause her to lose more than she gains. It's the classic tradeoff: warm fluffy sheets in exchange for a whole way of life. Throw some stretch jeans on that woman and you've got me at the big-box store trying to find someone to talk to me about mobile cellular telephones.

He's not easy to find. There are no sales associates in the store who were alive before cell phones. They stare at you mute when you explain that on your own phone you have to go out to the front yard and turn the crank on the spark generator to get enough steam to put a call through. They have no point of reference to know you're kidding, and no idea how to react, and they go limp with embarrassment.

If you take all the people who have never owned a cell phone and lay them end to end, they can all hear each other, even without the string and cans. It's an exclusive group, and we cannot abandon it lightly. Dave and I pretty much knew we'd get cell phones eventually, and have seen many times when one would come in handy. I've got a trip coming up and now seems to be the time to pull the trigger. I once covered the better part of two airport concourses before I found a pay phone. I dumped in quarters and called my ride, while she was at the curb watching me do it and waving.

On our last trip, we rented a car. I asked the winsome twenty-year-old at the desk if she had a New Mexico map for me, and she produced a nice simple version on what looked like a paper placemat. We walked out to our car, which was already running, and she handed me a plastic souvenir knob and wished us well. I got in, and then realized there was no key in the ignition, and I didn't know how to turn the car off, which I anticipated having to do, so I went back in the office to ask. She explained that the plastic knob allowed me to push the button. Oh! I explained that my car didn't have any doo-dads on it at all. It was a tiny little thing with a steering wheel and go-and-stop pedals and nothing else--it's not much more than a big helmet. If I had any more questions, the nice young lady said, I could give her a call. No I can't, I said. We don't have cell phones. She looked stricken. Did we know where we were going? Did we bring our own GPS? I told her no, but we were fine, with that nice map she gave us.

But, she said. She looked worried. Oh, she was worried. She couldn't have looked more upset if she had been laid up with a busted foot and had to send MeeMaw out into the snowstorm on the bum mule to fetch Doc Pritchart. And it was absolutely clear to us that she herself had no idea how to get to Los Alamos using just her own neurons and a placemat map.  She may not get lost, with all her tools, but she has lost something.

But when we finally made the jump, I always thought, we would try to find the dumbest possible phone. You know, one that can only allow you to talk to someone in Thailand while you're lugging out the trash. I have no idea what texting is for. And Dave doesn't have the paws for it in any case. It would be like trying to play hop-scotch in clown shoes.

Then the iPhone came out and it was pretty clear that it was a wonderful item. You could point it at the sky and find out what stars you were looking at. Name a tree by taking a photo of a leaf. Dave could  hook up to the site where he snoops on people's houses and finds out what they pay in taxes and how many bedrooms they have. He does that anyway, back at home, but now he could do it while standing in their very driveway looking big and sketchy. There are millions of apps. Probably one that will figure out what you were going to say. After a certain amount of hesitation on your part, the voice lady will pipe up and say "I have found nine nouns for you." It was a seductive idea. No longer would Dave and I have to walk around having our normal conversation: what was the name of that woman, you know that woman, the one in the show, the show with the guy who did that thing, you know that guy, he used to be in that other show? We would have the answer to everything in our little warbling pockets. We might not even have to talk at all. We could just amble on in parallel, peering into our little screens. All that for about a hundred bucks a month. It seemed a dream.

But are the fluffy sheets of unlimited data worth what we'd lose? As it is now, we have only one computer. It's a nice one, but not portable, so when we walk away from it, we can talk to each other, and notice the world. In fact, having only the one computer, we talk to each other all of the time.

Mostly, we say "can I have that machine now?"

We did it. We got our own dumb phones. The staff at the store said the last time someone came in and bought his first phone was last summer. Unless it was the summer before that.

The Dodo Demographic

I have joined an exclusive club just by virtue of having lived long enough. No, Petunia, it's not the Colonoscopy Club. Okay, it is, but that's not what I was talking about. No, it's not the Better Check Your Drawers After You Sneeze Club. All right, I'm in that one too, but I meant something else. No no no, not the I have No Idea Where I Was Headed At The Beginning Of This Sentence Club, although, yes, I am a member. Where was I? Who are you? Shut up.

Phone book. I am in the I Am In The Phone Book Club. Someone just asked me the other day what my address was, and I dashed off that breezy response from yesteryear--"I'm in the book." The person querying had no idea what book I meant. And these days, that doesn't make her the stupid one. It no longer occurs to anyone to look up an address in the phone book. A long time ago, we had a fat phone book containing the white and yellow pages. Your mommy would put it on your chair so you could reach your strained peas. Then we got a fat white pages, and the yellow pages, which were even fatter, got their own book. Then the yellow pages whelped and three tubby tomes thunked onto the front porch every fall. It was getting unruly. But just when it seemed we'd have to reinforce the floor under the phone table, the books started to shrivel up. Our most recent white pages is so thin we use it to shim up the table leg. A guy in his deathbed could karate-chop it in two. Next year, we'll be skipping it across the pond. It's a tiny slice of America, it is, and I'm in it.

This makes the phone book not only a relic, but a reliable snapshot of a certain demographic. It's a demographic I'm proud to belong to, if only because shame is so pointless.

Another thing that's changed is that people call each other up now just to find out where they are. We used to know exactly where someone was when we dialed her number. [Dialed? Look it up, Petunia, I don't have all day.] When I called my friend, I knew she was lying on her bed, admiring her toenail polish and languidly twirling the cord on her Princess Phone. My parents were not so indulgent as to provide me with a bedroom phone, so I was in the kitchen with the phone cord bent around the corner, leaning up against the boomerang-spangled Formica countertop as far away from my parents' ears in the living room as I could stretch the cord. GPS, hell. We could pinpoint each other's locations within microns.

So this is The Book, this thing I'm dangling here between my thumb and forefinger, and I'm in it. If you want to know where I live and what my phone number is, this is where you might look. It's also a good place to locate your market, if you happen to have a lot of carbon paper or Jumbo Diapers to unload.

Where Does The Dime Go?

My niece Sara, who flits with ease across the planet, from Germany to Tanzania to Washington, D.C., came home to Portland for a few days over Christmas between flits, and then she flitted off to Aspen. It was wonderful seeing her in person, however briefly. Just about as soon as she had left, I thought: Dang. I totally forgot to tell her about the turtle lady.

Then I realized: this isn't the nineteenth century. I have lots of ways I can still tell her about the turtle lady. I could write about it longhand with a goose quill and blob it with sealing wax. Except the wax will jam up the postal machinery. Or I can send her an e-mail. Then I thought: Dang. She isn't going to be at her home for a week and I want to tell her now. Then I thought: Dang. She's probably got something the size of a matchbook right in her hip pocket that snags e-mails out of thin air before they get lost in the series of tubes. She's thirty; she has satellites out there working for her twenty-four hours a day.

Or I could call her. She has a petite phone right there in the other hip pocket and I could waltz right over to the phone I have, stuck in the wall, and call her right up, and there she'd be, and I could tell her about the turtle lady. Trouble is, I hate talking on the phone. There was a year or so in eleventh grade when I spent hours on the phone every night talking to my best friend Janice, but except for that interlude, I have actively disdained the instrument. I saw my first Cellular Mobile Phone when I was on a bicycle tour in the early 90's. They first appeared as disturbing Bricks of Mystery in the back of people's Spandex shorts, but when they pulled them out and punched numbers into them with their big meaty fists, the rest of us were jealous; we were standing in long lines to use the few public phones set up for us in camp. I still didn't want one. But as they became smaller and more ubiquitous, it was easy to see their usefulness. What if, for instance, you were standing in the meat aisle and couldn't decide for yourself whether to go with pork chops or chicken? You could call home and make someone else decide. Or what if you were on your way to Tyler's house and couldn't call him to say you were at 33rd and Broadway about to hang a left through that pack of screaming pedestrians and you'd be there in five minutes? Now you could. What if you were in line at the store and got the urge to call Shaniqua and tell her you were in line at the store? Not a problem.

Still, I haven't bought one. I probably will some day, but I really don't like talking on the phone. And I don't know how to use one. I have to be shown every time. One day at work a guy handed me his phone to talk to someone on the other end, and I kept trying to move the phone from my ear to my mouth to talk, it was so little, even though this didn't appear to be necessary. Finally we signed off, and I didn't know how to hang up, so I folded the little phone up with a snap, and then flew into a prompt panic. Was he still in there? Did I smoosh him? I had quite the little audience by that time, and the expressions ranged from frank amusement to something approaching horror.

I had an Uncle Bill, and the least weird thing about him was that he lived in the rank San Joaquin Hotel For Men in San Francisco. The lobby was redolent of medicine and pee, and he had a small room down the hall with a neatly made cot. I had sought him out, and this inspired him to go visit the rest of the family, all of whom had thought themselves rid of him decades before. He went on a trans-national trek on Greyhound, a tiny, nearly blind, frequently soused man clutching a fair portion of his life's savings in a fat wad of rolled-up bills. It was scary. He spent no more than a half day at any relative's house--North Carolina, Maine, Oregon--before climbing back on the bus. When he asked to use the telephone in our home, we watched in disbelief as he fumbled with a handful of quarters and dimes, looking for a slot to put them in. I couldn't believe anyone, in 1977, could be that out of it. And now I realize that that's how my friends feel about me.

I don't care. I don't want a cell phone. I want to leave my internet plugged into the wall so I can walk away from it. And although they may already make products that will bring all the world's knowledge to my hip pocket, none of this technology will be available to me until they figure out a way I can retrieve information by sticking a thumb up my butt. Because that's going to be my default stance.

So if anyone sees Sara, tell her there's a lady in Hillsboro, name of Rosemary Lombard, who's been able to teach turtles to draw.