by Katherine GreiderThe other day, when I confessed to my husband that I had requested a "copy" of the online journal our college-age niece edits, he bent down at the knees, pawed the air, turned his face to the ceiling, and let out a mournful roar. That would be a woolly mammoth, sinking into the tar pits at La Brea.
I get this sort of thing a lot. And I've always been a good sport about it. I surrender the keyboard or remote control at the first exasperated sigh of a child grown impatient with my fumbling. Like the elderly relative who each year exclaims, "My, how tall you are!" I make all the requisite noises of awe for the high-tech gadgetry that has allowed music, video and communications to go completely mobile, breaching all boundaries of space and time, not to mention for the skills that let people surf this extraterrestrial wavelength with aplomb. All hail the fleet and nimble thumbs of youth.
Well, maybe it's the ravages of peri-menopause, but lately I find my mood has changed. Faced with a seemingly endless torrent of hoopla over the mind-bending possibilities of this or that next-generation smartphone, I want to say, quoting a phrase from my own youth, big whoop. When my children, at 10 and 14, cock their heads, wearing an expression of forbearance, and tell me, "Mom, you don't really understand our culture," I find myself wanting to yelp, "Right back atcha, dearies!"
How could they understand? They weren't around in the Nehi-orange, slap-happy 1970s, the decade that encompassed the bulk of my childhood. We had no inkling about MP3 players, laptops, tablet computers, the Internet, video streaming, cellphones, GPS-enabled hand-held devices, or even cable television, for crying out loud. But we had just as strong a cultural and psychological investment in the technologies we did have. If today's kids are like hunter-gatherers packing their lightweight tools wherever they roam, we were homesteaders gathered around our warm and lovely technological hearths.
When I was a child, my family watched TV, listened to records, and talked on the phone only in fixed locations inside our own home, at more or less circumscribed times. All Americans did. Now, without a second thought, we're uncoupling these enjoyments from domestic life in a shift that may turn out to be as momentous as when Americans evicted childbirth and death from their homes in the early twentieth century.
I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying let's take a moment to reflect. I'm saying that maybe some day long hence, people will want to know what it was like when telephones were literally tethered to the kitchen wall. Come close, and I'll tell you: It was awesome.
First of all, the receiver. It was only a receiver -- no buttons, no screen, no folding mechanism, just this smooth, solid, ergonomically elegant object meant to be held to the ear. And the corkscrewy cord confined you to a small sphere where what you did was simply this: talk on the phone. I remember looping this cord around my finger as I lay on the floor next to the refrigerator, its motor gently humming and warming the linoleum. Or I'd sit on the back stairs, communing with the coats and purses and dog leashes. And the sound quality! Reach out and touch someone. That's what it was like. No traffic, no grocery clerks, no huffing and chuffing as the person you're talking to dashes for the bus.
Phone numbers were associated, not with individuals, but with households. Any number we were likely to use again we scribbled on the side of a cupboard beside the phone. Each number had its own position and style and became a little memento of the day you wrote it down; together these jottings formed a spatial representation of the whole family's relationships, formed, continued, occasionally abandoned.
My children, who use cellphones almost exclusively, are strangers to the fact that apparently separate telephones may be connected to a single line, which in turn is embedded in the walls of the house. So they don't really get certain fond traditions of my youth. Like fighting over the phone. Listening in on someone else's conversation (you must raise the receiver ever so gently from its cradle). Or bellowing across the house for a call's intended recipient to pick up! in another room. My children will never know the exquisite fright of a friend's parent breaking in to snap, "I told you to get off an hour ago!"
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