Maybe it’s just that I am getting older, but I feel like I am starting to have a hard time processing change.

To be honest, I haven’t been able to keep up for a long time now, but I am just publicly admitting it now. In fact, the first crack in my “hip-with-it” armour started sometime in the 1990s. That’s when I first became aware that I no longer knew every musical group on the charts. At the time I sloughed it off to the fact that Sheila and I had three baby boys. Who can keep up with anything when you have three kids in diapers? Then I blamed it on the fact that I lived in Prince Edward Island, a world then-dominated by country music.

Then there is the obvious, behind the times ‘tell,’ which is that I still don’t carry a cell phone with me on a regular basis. Sheila and I share one and use it mostly for emergencies and for keeping connected to the kids. I don’t want one on principle really, at least that is what I tell myself. Presently we are without one since the last phone slipped into the dishwater and thus became permanently washed up.

Now you might think: “Perfect opportunity, Grant, to get into the cell game: time to pick up a smart phone of some kind, particularly when it was your wife that destroyed the last phone, time to cash in on that guilt and get something really sweet!”

True, I could justify doing that, but the truth is that I don’t want a smart phone. Dumb phones were hard enough for me to work, why would I want something that only makes me feel dumber? Did you know that smart phones are called smart phones for that very reason: their smartness is inversely proportional to how dumb they make you feel? John, my oldest, just the other day said, “Dad, Nokia makes a phone with big buttons and no features: that would be good for you!” That was the equivalent of him saying, “Dad, maybe you need a first response pager just in case you fall over and need to call for help. You might want to start thinking about a walker while you’re at it!”

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