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Button Replacement
By Judy Keifer, Litchfield
I am not a big fan of the telephone. If I say I am going to call you, don't hold your breath. And since I am forbidden to touch my husband's computer, that eliminates e-mail, which I don't like either … especially the ones I get from one of my daughters, who lists her 450 dearest friends at the top of the page—and squeezed in there somewhere is "Mom."
My husband tries to be helpful by getting up early and bringing in the newspaper and pasting a yellow sticky note on it that says (today, for example): "Good morning! 11 degrees outside with a high of only 19 degrees, but it will be sunny. Today is Dump Day." He knows I love to go to what Litchfield prefers to call the Recycling Center. I dutifully trot in every week with our newspapers. We get two daily papers, the Litchfield paper, and the Litchfield County Times. It makes quite a stack.
Anyway, to get back to my original premise about phones, of course I really hate cell phones. Even if they don't give you ear cancer, you could be seriously injured by some yuppie trying to balance a hot cappuccino, and talk on their cell phone, and steer their huge SUV.
My distrust of cell phones was really sealed when one of our sons and his fiancee went to Venezuela to meet her parents. A few days passed, and my husband fielded a call from our son saying that all he wanted to do was: "get out of here … I gotta go … go … this cell phone is breaking up."
So, of course, I pushed the Mom Panic Button. Politics have been volatile in that country, and I was sure that they were arrested and in some horrible jail, with a bucket for a toilet, and rags to sleep on. Sleep? I think I slept only a few hours for the next couple of nights, worrying and stewing, which is one of my specialties. And where was the couple in real life? At a fancy hotel in Aruba, drinking margaritas on the beach and planning their June wedding.
Am I the only parent who is slow to admit that my children all are responsible adults? Could I have that Mom Panic Button surgically removed? Maybe it could be replaced with one that says, "Whatever … you'll be fine … ba-bye!"
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