I had an interesting conversation with my mother recently, and during our talk she told me she was sad.
A grandmother to my two kids, my sister’s three and my brother’s three girls, she has had the chance to observe the lifestyle changes that have taken place since I was that ornery kid roaming the Woodsdale neighborhood. And she doesn’t like what she sees.
“Those cell phones,” she quipped. “It’s all about those cell phones.”
At 88 years old, most of her life was spent without things like cellular devices and the Internet, and my mother was raised while the Great Depression caused folks to depend on the very minimal. She recalls listening to radio shows and then the introduction of the black-and-white television, and yes, she remembers when my father would instruct me to flip the channel to one of the 12 stations we had when I was much younger.
“There’s more to life than a cell phone,” she vented to me. “It’s like they aren’t living their lives.”
That’s when I explained to her that cell phones and iPads and laptops now are vital tools of many trades these days because of the rapid pace of technological advancements made during the past 20 years, a period of time my mother has not been in the workforce.
She didn’t want to hear it.
Then I explained that employment anymore is dependent on experience with inventions like Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and Google Drive.
She wasn’t impressed.
“You kids need to slow down,” she insisted. “Instead of looking up places on that Internet, just go there and see it for yourselves. Get the phones out of your faces and see what’s out there. It’s worth it, so you should write about that.”
Mom has a point, so I did.
