EAST MONTPELIER – My kid was mountain biking on a hill near his home in Arkansas and realized he’d lost his cell phone out of his pocket somewhere along the trail. Without his phone, he was incommunicado, but another rider lent him his. He called home, his wife hit “Find Will’s phone” on her phone, and she was able to send him a map showing the exact spot in the woods where the mislaid phone lay.
Now, that’s amazing to me, but it seems to be a normal, accepted fact of life in the electronic age, which I understand we’re in. I heard about his pickle because I found myself in a similar one, but was stranded, with no idea what to do about it.
That’s the trouble with change. It’s exciting, sometimes threatening, and according to the sage Heraclitus (attributed), the only constant. There’s no way we can avoid it, and a million ways we can respond to it. Miniver Cheevy, for example, a poetic creation of Edwin Arlington Robinson, spends his entire life crying into his beer over the loss of the good old days: “. . . [he] eyed a khaki suit with loathing; he missed the medieval grace of iron clothing.” On the other hand, some of us clearly have never met a new idea we didn’t like. I often think of Vermont vis-à-vis New Hampshire that way. New ideas introduced to the Vermont legislature often seem to evoke the reaction, “It’s probably a wacky idea. Sounds unlikely. But hell, there’s fewer’n 650,000 of us. Let’s try it. We don’t like it, we can always repeal it.” The sober solons of Concord, however, sniff at it and declare, “If it’s a good idea, we’d’ve had it 250 years ago. Forget it.”
Me, I kind of like change. Polarfleece, which I looked at askance when it came out, has almost completely replaced wool and down in my winter wardrobe. Letting go of my tiny white gas camping stove was harder, but it’s now in my museum. And if I wore a cap as Elon Musk often does, the slogan on the forehead would read, “Bernie was right!” Still, I’ve come a long way since our dial telephone was shaped like a blooming daffodil, the long series of typewriters and computers starting with my 1952 Smith-Corona, and news via a Western Union messenger at the door. So I hope I may be forgiven if sometimes I appear to be gasping.
The other trouble with change is that, as I ease into the unfamiliar territory of advanced age, it seems to be happening faster and faster, so that I’m not able to keep pace. It’s probably a combination of diminishing speed of cognition and increasing tempo of innovations in the programs I use every day for writing and communicating.
I have a recurring nightmare of waking up in my tent in the morning in the middle of nowhere, finding my tentmate’s sleeping bag gone, and hearing my chums outside sliding the canoes into the water. I’m getting left behind.
I’m very happy with my cell phone, but, I’ve found, have an inadequate appreciation of its value in my life. After I took a series of falls, my friend Bea urged me to get a Dick Tracy wristwatch like hers, which reacts to the motion of an apparent accident by asking if I’d like it to call for help. The two of them, the phone and the wristwatch, talk to each other all the time, unbeknownst to me till this week.
I woke up from a nap in my recliner and couldn’t find my phone. Oh, boy! Not in the car, not in the bedroom, kitchen, bed, or bathroom. I looked everywhere (clearly not an accurate statement). Then, in a sudden burst of inspiration, I spoke to my wrist watch, asking Siri to find my phone. She hemmed and hawed for a bit, sort of cleared her throat, and said, “Pinging Willi’s phone” (I use an old nickname to distinguish myself from my son). Next thing I knew, the recliner sprang to life. Kiki, snoozing peacefully in it, looked up with a sort of what-the-hell? expression. I followed the pinging, glimpsed the screen glowing far down inside the chair, and fished it out.
That evening, during my regular FaceTime call with the kids in Arkansas (See? I told you I was up to date), I ecstatically reported my success. They were singularly unimpressed, and responded with the story about my son’s phone lost on the trail. In fact, they said, if they’d known about my situation, they could have located my phone here in my house from theirs in Arkansas. They implied gently, in deference to my feelings, that everybody knows that (another inaccurate statement). Well, I do now, and I’m ready for my next marvelous discovery.
It lies within three feet of me as I sit here at my desk. But what’s the question?
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
