Hot summer nights in July, darkness descends and the fragrance of grilled hamburgers and fresh cut grass wafts in the air, night creatures chatter and chirp and children come and go while we stand on our front porch occasionally rattling the ice cubes in a near empty glass of ice tea. In Washington D.C. our elected lawmakers debate the national budget while millions of people await the outcome, their lives on hold. But we all know what’s really crucial---our cell phones.
Cell phones are more important than the budget as I recently learned when my phone went missing-- a small bit of technology which I found in the washing machine. I immediately adopted our government’s strategy of finances by ignoring lack of funds and decided it must be replaced immediately. Until then my life really was on hold.
Cell phones are crucial and used so much that it’s illegal in North Carolina to drive while text-messaging. Trying to type out a message on a tiny keyboard while traveling at 65 m.p.h. is dangerous (“I’m hurrying home dear. I’ll be there in 15 min---NO NO NO aieeeeeeee!”) but it’s okay to call and talk on a cell phone at 65 m.p.h. I have to scroll down to find a number so I steer with my knees and call my mother which she thinks is a marvel since she is 76 and remembers when phones hung on walls, had cords and you talked standing in one place. “But honey, is this safe?” she asks.
Well, no, it’s not but then nothing in life is completely safe. Cholesterol, gamma rays, cigarette smoke, a tsunami just as you walk out on the beach, your housekeeper seduces you and has your baby and years later you have to secretly buy her a $100,000 house---it’s a jungle out there.
Back in the day the highway was a place of freedom without fear. We worshiped cars. I loved to run errands for my mother that involved driving to the city which was 21 miles from our farm. Why? There was a perfectly straight stretch of lawless road, highway 43, that ran through lonely tobacco fields and towering pine forests on which I maintained my 1971 Pontiac Firebird at 105 m.p.h. ( no seatbelt, mind you) for 13 miles of that trip. I weighed the chances of a farmer slowly pulling his old pick-up truck onto the highway and our two lives becoming tangled together but I raced anyway, and when I got to the city limits I changed back into a nice Christian boy helping his poor mother.
A little bureaucrat inside me wants to crack down on speeding and cell phone users but a young boy in me wants the free open highway. We all want contradictory things. You can go to the theater and experience a musical and leave feeling uplifted and enlightened but then hear Willie Nelson sing “On the Road Again” and feel just as enlightened and happy. And a sweet child singing “Jesus Wants me for Sunbeam” can tear your heart apart like all get out
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So let us be smart and drive carefully and let our leaders work through their political tangles and squabbles. They are working with our contradictions—we are a people that want much but we have not the means. We need reforms yet we are leery of reform and those fears cluster like seagulls gathered in the K-Mart parking lot. But they will rise as a cloud when we drive through them and we’ll motor down the road with our cell phones, call our families and life will go on
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