With two daughters away at college now -- and with me back in school, with classmates not much older than said daughters -- I've begun to adapt to the next generation's means of staying in touch.
The Daughters, like their colleagues, seem to communicate via the following means and media, ranked in order of frequency of use:
- Cell phone: calls
- Cell phone: texting
- Blogs
- Carrier pigeon
- Two cans attached by a string
- ESP
- Land line
- Face-to-face interaction
Growing up next to the University of Chicago, my friends and I always laughed at how U of C students would cross the street reading a book, never looking up as they stepped into traffic. Not much has changed in the last few decades -- only now U of C students plunge into traffic not reading, but texting or talking on their cell phones.
I took two lessons from this: first, concentrate on crossing the damn street. Second -- stay in touch with the Daughters by text!
This has been jolly good fun for me. I can text them from a class I'm sitting in, furtively working my thumbs, and set their phones a-buzzing in classes they're sitting in half a continent away. They usually answer a text within moments, painting a quick Impressionist image of that moment in their harried lives.
If I want to write a longer, more parental missive, I'll e-mail them. Sometimes it takes them days to answer. But when they do, they fill in more blanks, paint a fuller picture of what's occupying their time and preoccupying their minds. They also usually attach a paper they want me to read and edit.
I stay far away from their Facebook pages. Middle Daughter won't even befriend me! (At some point, she'll be applying for jobs and have to take off all those incriminating pictures . . .)
Today's classroom buzzes and hums. The days of single-minded absorption are over. The young study with their iPods pumping music into their crania, their cell phones mumbling and twitching like a bound-and-gagged mafia stool-pigeon.
I like letting the daughters know I'm thinking of them, in less than 100 characters.
That's a good thing . . . right?
--T.A.
I am thoroughly amused. :)
Posted by: Chaviva | December 14, 2008 at 08:35 PM
"their cell phones mumbling and twitching like a bound-and-gagged mafia stool-pigeon."
What a perfect image.
Posted by: amba | December 14, 2008 at 11:43 PM