So, last summer, I was sitting in the park watching over the brood of theater camp students I was wrangling. (By day, I am mother to two and I teach dance and drama to children, which is an occupation not unlike "Ell Wrangler" or "Cat Herder", only slightly less glamorous - Anyway, there I was, eating some greek yogurt, chit-chatting with my colleagues and watching kids play (okay, trying to keep them from killing themselves on the playground when Connor, the human jumping bean, the busiest, most distracted, least attentive, most disruptive little kid at camp whips out his cellphone.
"Connor," I say. "Whatcha need your phone for?"
"Did mom forget to pack your lunch?"
"No," he says, a wide grin across his face. "My phone has a sweet game on it I want to play."
"But Connor, you're at camp. You have 60 kids here, just waiting to play with you."
I gesture around the playground and the scenes of frolicking. But Connor barely looks up from his bleeps and twizzers and wild ninja thumb action.
"Connor, you know, I'm almost 40, and I don't even have a cellphone."
"You don't?" he gasps. Then out come the phones, all tweenie and sparkles, soon a circle of little phones are staring me in the face.
"Why don't you have a phone?" asks a 6th grader with wide Suzi Hoo eyes. It's as if I've just told her I don't have indoor plumbing.
"Because I don't want one."
I don't want. I've never wanted one. Not since they first came on the scene and Gordon Gekko made them look so cool, carrying around his weighty "Wall Street" appendage like a piece of scrimshaw. Weren't the first phones about six thousand dollars, too?
We used them at a volunteer job I had back then, trawling the streets of Portland, OR, in the then-gritty Pearl neighborhood, handing out condoms to street kids from the suburbs, and talking on our massive cellphones. They said we had to walk in teams because it was safer, but I think it was so we could take turns carrying the phone. It was huge!
I did own a phone, sort of, for a week. It was when we were leaving NY, driving cross-country with our two-year-old and our border collie and two cats in our Volvo 240, bound from NYC to my hometown, Eugene, OR.
Or friends were skeptical, first of all, that the Volvo would make. Okay, okay, she had left us on the BQE more than once. The highlight was after a party in Manhattan, wee hours of the morning, about two degrees outside, and us, without a phone. The nearest civilization was a topless bar near the Brooklyn Costco, and I waited patiently in its foyer while my husband waded in looking for a payphone to call a tow truck. Good times!
But would a rental car have made it 3,000 miles in five days? Methinks not. In fact, once we got out into the open sea, the deep blue of this country where only truckers roam, guess what kinds of cars we saw? Giant, massive Volvo semitrucks! Their drivers would honk cheery little honks at us, and give us admiring 'thumbs up' as they passed us on the highway. One even rolled down his window and stuck out his fist in solidarity. Word!
And it's a good thing we weren't in some rented Ford Festiva, because the dang phone I got on 6th Ave in Manhattan, after a good drubbing from my daughter's godfather, didn't work in half the fair states in this land. Ben would have had to wade into topless bars in Wyoming and Nebraska and parts of Western Pennsylvania and ALL of Eastern Oregon. When we hit terra firma at Grandma Alice's house, I took a shower, and went to return that phone.
People have three different reactions when they learn I don't have a cellphone:
Some say, "Oh, I wish I had that luxury, but blah blah blah." It's always something, work, the kids, the mother with gout, whatever. Really, they have - you have, presumably - learned that you cannot live without it.
Some act accusingly, saying, "But what if there's an emergency?"
An emergency... Away from people? In the middle of nowhere? Can I get cellphone coverage there, anyway? Hey, I have a plan in case of an emergency: My plan is your plan. If I really, really need a cellphone, then I can just borrow yours. I capitalize on my friendly face and your preparedness to make my call. But really, I have never ever had to do this.
And the third group of people react with a skirted annoyance, as is I really do have a phone, but I'm making this unfathomable claim so that I don't have to give them my number.
Okay, so why?
Sociologists say that only 3% of the adult population in United States does not have a cellphone who has the means (is not too crazy, broke, infirm, in a coma, etc) to do so. They call us "Refusiniks". What are we - we merry band of brothers - refusing, exactly?
When I go to the park, I am just at the park. I'm there with my kids, and if I zone out and look at a tree while I should be playing with them, that's my business.
When I go out to dinner, or to the coffee shop, or to pick them up, I talk to people, I look at people. I can't believe how many people would rather dial into what's happening on a little screen than in the world right in front of them. I see it at classes, people checking facebook instead of watching their kid leap or turn, I see it in line at the grocery store, in the waiting room of the doctor's office. Cellphones aren't about 'emergencies' - they're about distraction. We've become a nation of Connors.
I want my kids to know that the space of time to do things without being interrupted has value. I want them to know that there's a separation between the present, and some text vying for a place in the fore.
We had to ask my mother-in-law to leave her iphone at home when visiting us, because my son was starting to ask for it, ahead of anything else she might do with her.
We would say, "Grandma Becky is coming for a visit."
And he'd say "Is she bringing her iphone?"
He wanted the games and the bleeps and the whirring. He wanted the same dopamine release we all crave from feeling connected and from relating.
This last visit, it stayed home, and they worked puzzles, read books and went to the diner for pancakes. And when they were there, they just talked.
It's a new game on my phone, called, breakfast and conversation. We play it every morning.
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