Techno/Eco/Parental Grief
Where, oh where, oh where did it go, my stupid tiny little phone? I didn't even love my phone, though I was proud of it, because it wasn't—I’m talking about it in past tense, I guess that's true, but I feel a bit like I’m talking about someone not quite dead yet and the guilt of talking about them in past tense—It wasn't one of those, those I things or robot things, so big they leave fade marks in jeans pockets, but more often than not are held in hands—hands that must negotiate the relocating these blocks of metal to find each other to hold, my sons’ ears no longer listening to sounds around them (mostly my voice), and I don't know whose voice is pouring into their brains through those tiny white objects in their ears that make me fear, not alien reprogramming, but alienation from hand-holding and listening.
My phone was the NOT of all that. Tiny, fit in the palm of my hand, barely a smartphone at all. I was proud of that when I finally gave up the dumb phone my carrier would no longer provide service for. This phone, tiny black lump of plastic, was the dumbest smartphone I could find.
Where did you go? Are you under a clump of poison oak on the side of the trail? I re-hiked the whole three-mile loop looking for you the next day, scanning left and right, sure I'd find you. But I did not. You must have fallen in some growth, maybe rolled a bit down a hill, and none of the remote pinging caught the attention of hikers who came later. Now I can see on my laptop your battery dying, this morning at 12%, and I am feeling this strange grief for this thing I hate, virtually watching it die and knowing I'll never see it again.
And now thrown into the tech world I hate with a passion: iPhone Android Verizon AT&T T-Mobile. My teenage sons push me to join the 21st century and I have to admit that I can no longer keep my tinfoil hat shiny and polished.
It's not just the damn phone.
It's the way I cannot persuade my sons to sit at a restaurant during a meal and NOT look at their phones. It's the surreptitious glances down at their sides, the long trips to the bathroom, the last-thing-at-night and first-thing-in-the-morning devotion they have to it.
And, I, too, feeling myself inevitably pulled along, unable to escape wherever it is we're all headed.
And you, tiny black Unihertz phone under a clump of poison oak in Shiloh Ranch, you will die today or tomorrow, I imagine, and summer heat will warp your plastic, and then winter rains, and the clods of dirt the cyclists will kick up as they tear down the trails. Right now, I'm feeling some sort of consolation, knowing that the redwoods and grasses and creek will outlast you, that you will fade into invisibility, uselessness, oblivion, while ants and beetles crawl over the lock screen that no longer urgently flashes, “If found, please call!!” The note I left taped on the trail head will fade away until a ranger takes it down, my phone will stay lost, in a forest that will not give up its secrets.
And me? And my sons?
How will we stay not lost to each other?
How will I remind them that hands are meant for holding, ears meant for listening to the people around them and the birds in the apple orchard in springtime?