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Will you just Phone me, please?

☕️😁😵‍💫😳🙏🤔🫤 📅

I’d like to think that, despite my age, and increasing bodily deformities, I am still au fait with the times. I’d like to believe that I can still seamlessly morph from past crotchets, past idiosyncrasies, to modern variations of similar ilks -like the ability to use an unfamiliar, and no doubt obsolete plural form of ‘ilk’ as if I were simply changing socks… or am at least cleverly neologizing.

I have, for example, easily converted from the heavy, bolted-down telephones of my youth, to the more convenient pocket based carry-on varieties, despite the bothersome discovery that my typewriter-trained fingers could not hit the correct characters on the little smartphone keyboard; nor could they fathom a use for the emojis that littered one of the deeper layers of the screen that I inadvertently accessed one day in search of a capital letter.

That’s the thing about brains though: even old wiring still works as long as it isn’t overtaxed and gets enough sleep. I used to dread the telephone tag I was often forced to play in the old days when I was still a useful member of society. Nowadays, though, the few of us that ‘conceal-carry’ our mobile phones seem restricted to those over 40; the younger majority, who have all been assigned special but unrememberable generational labels, positively hand-flaunt their phones whether in a restaurant or on the bus. Their only concessions to propriety, in their overwhelming need to access personalized noise, are clunky earphones or earbuds that train them for hearing aids like mine; the side effect, if it is music they crave, is the incessant humming, the barely articulate mimicking of lyrics, and the irritating head bobbing.

But I digress; I meant to Jeremiad about voice-mail tag. I suppose I’m partly to blame for the game though: my voice message says to leave a message and, although often cleverer than mine, the phoner’s message only encourages my message to talk to his in a mindless iteration. In a strange way it reminds me of Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise… neither message gets you any closer to the person you’re trying to reach -only by sitting beside them on the bus can you actually exchange information…

Then I learned something astonishing from a kid sitting in the seat beside me on the bus; he obviously noticed me leaning over and eyeballing his deft finger movements on the tiny keyboard on his phone screen. With an exaggerated shrug when I asked him what he was doing, he explained the mysteries of texting – something I’d heard about but never tried. There is another, quicker method to exchange thoughts than voice mail or even Emails, he explained with an eye-roll; and more difficult to ignore if you set the notification on your phone to keep repeating its beep at regular intervals until you eventually give up and answer it.

Seeing the wide-eyed awe of his incredibly elderly seatmate, he showed me how to initiate the process. I saw it as momentous; it was like remembering where you were when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon in 1969 (I was on a ferry then; my seatmate was only a dream in his grandfather’s eye); I was on a bus this time, and thence forever lured into its seductive labyrinth.

I couldn’t believe I had been so mired in the grammatically-lettered past, that I’d avoided the best way of communicating with someone on whom I didn’t really want to waste words -or time. I mean, a few scattered verbs to convey the message, or a meaningful but noncommittal Emoji or two and then, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth said after murdering King Duncan, ‘I have done the deed’. Its brevity is not construed as impolite -except by my elderly friends who have yet to access their phone’s textual function- but with a little instruction from their wives, could answer in kind if they, too, were concealed- carriers like the rest of us.

I fully appreciate the eye-rolls amongst the younger crowd that so important a smartphonal function could have remained unused, or as yet undiscovered. Still, for some reason, I am reminded of the fictional Shangri-La in the mountains of Tibet in the famous 1933 novel ‘Lost Horizon’ -which I suspect also remains as yet undiscovered by the youth who usually surround me on the bus. But perhaps I am quibbling as usual: trying to justify my own unshared priorities.

Still, I was unwilling to concede my newfound knowledge as age-incommensurate and decided to text Allen. He’d stopped attending our Wednesday morning coffee meetings in the Food Court soon after his wife left him -or did she die? He was never clear on that. Anyway, I thought he’d be a valid subject on whom to try out my texting skills; it would show that I kind of missed his acerbic wit at our gatherings, and yet was not begging for him to return to the fold in soppy long outdated phraseology.

“hey al,” I typed, careful not to use punctuation or capitalizations that might show my age. ‘missed you at…’ I paused for a moment, unsure whether to adopt the abbreviations my young seatmate had taught me: ‘mst’ instead of ‘missed’ and ‘u’ instead of ‘you’ but decided that with so short a message, its contextual meaning might be lost on an elder like Allen. Besides, I’m not sure he’d know why I texted him, or how to retrieve the text for that matter; I wondered if he might think I was just teasing…

I stuck with ‘missed’ and continued my message: ‘missed you at (I used the emoji for a steaming cup of coffee ☕️) and followed it with the round big-eyed head emoji 🙄. I ended it with ‘hope to (big eye emoji) 👁️ u (I figured he’d be ready for the normal word after all those emojis) on (calendar emoji 📆) Wednesday’ It took me so long to compose it I was tempted to simply text him in the English Miss Howdy had taught us in Grade 4, or whenever. But, it was a labour of love, a proof of concept, eh? So I pressed send and waited to see what would happen.

Within a minute, though, I got a reply (my first text message). All it ‘said’ was a big smiley face 😁 and a thumbs up 👍. Then, as a grammatically correct addendum: ‘Cleverly composed, G… How long did that take you?”

Without a pause, I answered, ’About 15 minutes, including the question I asked Google about how to write one of those things…’

He immediately replied with one of those upside-down head emojis 🙃 and the head with the spiral eyes 😵‍💫. I guess I’ll have to ask him what they mean on Wednesday…

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