My phone died.
It’s a small thing, really. An inconvenience. But it was seven years old, and had traveled the world with me, and lived a lot of years of transformation while riding in my purse and sitting on my coffee table. It was a constant companion, the camera I reached for when I didn’t want to bother with my “real one,” the jukebox for everything from CC songs on community days, to Elisabeth Elliot talks while I knit, to huge swaths of the Bible as I revisited the 90 Day Plan again and again. It was my co-pilot, charting the course as I roamed in Seattle, Kathmandu, D.C., Atlanta, the farthest backwoods of East Tennessee and Western North Carolina. It was Mary Hannah’s voice as she celebrated her 18th birthday in Idaho, and Babita’s post-earthquake in Nepal, Mathaus’ his first night in a dorm, and Jack’s from Basic, complete with screaming MTIs in the background.
I will miss that phone.
I don’t do technology shifts very well. I can remember feeling somewhat superior to my mother when I was 15 and we moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. VCRs were still the thing, and my mom had claimed our only television and the player for her room, no doubt hoping to fill the endless parade of her newly-single nights with something other than the voices in her own head.
“Hook up the VCR,” she told me, and I didn’t, because I had other things to do, and also, I was in a place where I resented anyone telling me to do anything.
A few days later, I spotted my 7 year-old brother testing cords in outlets behind the t.v. cart. It hit me that my mother, unable to wait for me to decide that I was willing to obey, had roped her second-grader into solving the problem. It seemed symbolic of everything I thought was wrong with adults and the world.
Now I realize it was just symbolic of the fact that we get used to our norms, and heaven help us as we navigate the changes. My mother could have figured out what went where to make the VCR come to life, but oh, the learning curve. The frustration of the blank screen. The confusion of the different drives and ports and inputs and “who designs this stuff, anyhow”? My mother was in tech survival mode, 1989 style. I mocked then, but…
We do not have cable or any kind of regular television service, whatever that looks like these days. Instead, we use a cord to connect a laptop to the back of what I suppose is a television. No joke– I learned how to do this just before Mathaus left for college this year, because finally, all of my IT people were gone and it was sink or swim if I ever wanted to show another Ken Burns documentary during school hours. It turns out that it’s not really challenging at all to connect the two, as long as no one has fiddled with anything, you know, computery inside the t.v. itself. You just take a cord which we leave conveniently plugged in to the t.v. and insert it into the only slot in which it fits on the laptop. Voila. Ken Burns, here we come.
I summitted that particular mountain. And I’ll get a new phone. It will make me nervous and likely frustrated for a while, but I’ll learn how to make it do what I want it to do. My older kids will try to explain how it can do all these other things, too, and I will say, “No, I don’t want that. Stop. Just a phone, that plays music and takes pictures, and has maps. That’s more than enough.” They will shrug and think I am incredibly behind the times, and they will be right.
But I don’t mind. I’m ok being an aging GenXer running to keep up in a Millennial world that is quickly leaving even them behind and looking more and more to GenZ. I’ll manage… until I can’t anymore. By then, God willing, I’ll have grandkids who don’t mind coming over to help me find my old photos on whatever crazy hands-free, cordless device they’ll have cooked up by then.