The picture was ordinary, stark and depressing: A subway car, packed with passengers, and everyone's head was bent down, staring at the objects in their hands. No conversation, no connection — just blank faces absorbed in private communion with the Information Rectangle.
You've noticed this practice, right? You've wondered: What have we become?
Thing is, it was a picture from the 1940s, and everyone was looking at newspapers. Not phones. You may tut-tut when you see people walking around looking down at their phones, but if you looked at old newsreels and saw everyone on the street reading a book or a paper, you'd say, "What a marvelously literate age."
Attachment to phones may be a bane; it's a wonder they don't put mattresses and cowcatchers on buses, given the number of people who stroll across the street staring down at the magic glowing slab. But the devices are marvelously useful when you realize you just poisoned your whole family, as I recently did.
What's that? Details, you say? Oh, if you insist.
Back up seven years. I bought a red light bulb for the garage because it was Christmas and I thought it would make the house look like a festive brothel that also developed photos. Every year I put it up in December and took it out around March.
Fast-forward to last Thursday. I'm unboxing a new gazebo. The previous gazebo had been lost in the Storms of June. The winds were bending the trees and tossing chairs, and I looked out the window to see the gazebo's fabric roof fill like a schooner's sail. The structure took flight, landing 15 feet away in the bushes.
I ran outside to save it, grabbing the metal poles in the teeth of a thunderstorm. Was I grounded? Well, in the sense of having a strong sense of family and community, yes, but not in the electrical sense. It occurred to me that I was quite likely to end up like a pop can placed in a microwave, and I let the gazebo go. Some say it came down by La Crosse, where it is venerated as gift from the gods.
