So my youngest child (who is fully an adult living in LA) and I were driving to do some Christmas returns today and she said to me, “So I was texting a friend about meeting for a movie tonight and I said, ” I am feeling nostalgic, maybe I’ll call.” I sat at the stop light.  Pondered for a moment and then I asked, ” Did you at one time talk on the phone a lot with her and now you have lost touch? Why were you feeling nostalgic about calling?”

“Oh, mom,” she said brushing off the question as though fending off the smell of a bad cigar.  “No one calls any more.  It’s all text.  Calling is so, (pause) so old fashioned.”

She went on to say the friend did not text back; didn’t laugh at her witty retort and that she had texted her again to say, “Why didn’t you respond to my joke?” And the friend had written back, as in wrote back in text language on her phone, “What should I have done? Said ha ha??”

There you have it.  Why the generation behind us old folk has lost the art of tone; the joy of innuendo in conversation. They don’t talk face to face or even room to room anymore.  They text.  Under the dinner table. From the toilet.  In the middle of the movie.  I see them everywhere, the little flash lights of their phone faces popping up like fireflies in the dark.

In the movie:

“BTW, did you like that line?”

“Yeah, it was sort of funny.”

“Do you want to hold hands?”

“LOL–I would drop my phone!”

Married couple texting in bed after a fight:

“I think I am done with you.”

“Just thinking the same thing.”

“Good so that’s it.  Light’s out?”

“Perfect, but I can’t reach it.  The lamp’s on your side.”

Fingers fly, heads stay bowed, rooms are silent with animated conversation. They give new meaning to the expression, “You’re all thumbs.” Now it is a compliment.

Lord help me.  I can see it now.  Death bed scene.  Paw Paw is on the respirator but his thumbs can still move; his cell in his hand.  Maw Maw is by his side.  Eyes damp with tears, fingers tapping.

“I will miss you.”

“Me, too.”

“Fuck you, bitch, I am outa here!”

“What?”

“I typed, I love you dearly and will treasure you through eternity.  Damn that auto correct.”

These kids are going to miss the days of faulty hearing and muffled words.  The written word is black and white. And sometimes that backspace just doesn’t work fast enough.