My father and I recently spent a week together traveling back East to see old friends in old neighborhoods. One morning we were sitting across from each other at a table adjacent to our free hotel breakfast buffet under a***image2*** giant-screen television blasting CNN. The rain was coming down in sheets outside and the room was abuzz with travelers eating, talking and making plans that didn't include sunshine.
"They have a pretty good breakfast here," my dad said, employing that look-on-the-bright-side philosophy that has gotten him and other Wilders through times of death, heartbreak and an extreme lack of style that really ran rampant around 1974.
"Indeed," I said, ripping open my sixth packet of ketchup to smother eggs the color and texture of the packing peanuts my wife uses to ship her artwork.
At the table next to us, a cell phone rang. A woman dressed for some sort of business that tries to make money reached into her bag.
"Is that for me?" my dad said to her, wiping his chin with a napkin. "Tell him I'm busy."
We weren't in church. The room was large and loud and hideously designed to accommodate three guys with moist mustaches, an East Indian wedding party and a family so irritated that they couldn't go to the beach that they were on the verge of slugging each other.
"I hate those things," my dad said. "They're always going off. And don't get me started with your brother and that cell phone attached to his ear 24 hours a day."
I'm just as irritated with how much cell phones have invaded our culture. As a teacher, I confiscate a dozen a week from students texting and talking under desks, behind corners and inside bathroom stalls. However, I also understand that they are as much a part of our culture as Michael Bay movies, couples with matching Hummers and a fascination for small dogs. My father makes it harder on himself by paying attention to every phone that rings instead of more important things like getting his knee replaced or the fact that we both might get colon cancer if we keep sampling free hotel breakfast buffets.
That night it was still raining so we decided to see a movie starring Bruce Willis as a detective who uses punches, kicks, funny barbs and self-inflicted gunshot wounds to fight a bunch of computer nerds who want to take over the world.
"That was a good movie," my dad said as we exited the lobby and walked toward a restaurant that had café-style seating outdoors. Somewhere close to us, a tune emerged that should have been attached to a very small ice cream truck.
"Dad," I said, "I think that's your cell."
"Oh god." He rooted around pants that had been purchased for a larger waist size during the term of a president now long dead. "Jesus. Hold on," he said, but I couldn't tell if it was directed to me, the lord, the phone or the caller who-along with the diners clustered in front of us-would be soon bathed in Navy-grade profanity.
Watching my dad talk on the cell phone was not unlike the way I imagine seeing a caveman handling the same technology if it fell from the sky back in the day. My father eyed the mini-machine warily then cradled it with his right hand while the left seemed to cast some sort of spell. I know now he was trying to shield the outside noise, but at the time he looked, well, like he was on some serious drugs.
"HELLO?" he barked, as loud as Alexander Graham Bell must have yelled at Thomas Watson in 1876. "HELLO?"
The two and three–tops in the roped-off section of the restaurant all shot my dad stares as fiery as the tiki torches illuminating their hydroponic-tomato salads.
"It's Katie!" he screamed, happy at his connection with my brother's wife and amazed that such things were indeed possible.
Robert Wilder's newest book is Tales from the Teachers' Lounge,
www.daddyneedsadrink.com.
