Welcome to the Modern World

I always considered myself somewhat of a Luddite.

Well, a lazy and un-dedicated Luddite because sometimes technology is simply too easy. But lately, I am a decided non-Luddite. I love technology. I love what technology has done for communication. And the only complaints that I can muster about technology are really my own personal issues.

This past weekend in Vermont, Jim and I were sitting on the gondola extolling the virtues of having left our cell phones in the house and having not brought them onto the mountain. We were heroes to one another, not allowing the accessibility of technology to interrupt our communion with the manipulated version of nature that we were riding for the day. Upon exiting the lift, we strapped into our snowboards and rode off down the mountain to enjoy the snow and icy patches unencumbered by text messages or phone calls. Jim is slightly faster than me, so he generally makes a habit of stopping at trail junctions to rest and make sure that we take the same trail to the bottom.

But this time Jim somehow took a different trail and sat and waited for me. And he waited some more. And I never showed up. I caught up to our friends who were faster than both of us and asked if they'd seen him. They hadn't. I had to play a bit of a guessing game. Maybe he had gone down the other trail I had ridden past that wasn't very well-marked. I tried that option to no avail. After two trips up the ski lift and down the mountain, there wasn't a particularly good option for locating him. So I rode with our fast friends for the rest of the day, struggling to keep up. Finally, on our last run before the mountain closed for the day, Jim came walking up while we were entering the lodge. After a kiss and a hug of relief, we vowed to insist that the option for text messaging and phone calls be in our jacket pockets every time we ride.

I've given this subject a lot of thought, and having spent most of my teenage life and all of my adult life with a cell phone, I still can't figure out how people met up with one another without anxiety and worry about getting the information correct. I am sure that people wrote down addresses and kept appointments, but it still blows my mind.