It was a typical teen-and-mother tussle - the sort that's played out in millions of households across America.
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"But, Mom, everyone I know has a cell phone!" said my 17-year-old son, Brandon, after I nixed his request for a Nokia.
"If everyone you knew had the bubonic plague, would you want it, too?" I said. "Would you want a gimp leg if all your friends had one?"
My child's gaze didn't waver. "I mean that, literally, Mom. Everyone has a cell phone except me."
"Ridiculous," I retorted. "You attend a public school! I suppose the next thing you'll tell is that ëeveryone' drives a Hummer with a built-in R2D player."
"Mom, you mean a DVD player."
"Whatever!"
Two days after my self-righteous tirade, the two of us attended an information meeting at Brandon's school in preparation for an upcoming field trip.
"Parents, I'm passing around a sheet," said Brandon's drama teacher. "If your child has a cell phone, please write the number down beside his or her name."
"Aha!" I said to Brandon. "So ëeveryone' has a cell phone, do they? We'll see about that."
The list traveled around the room, and when it got to me, I seized it with a gleeful, "I-told-you-so" gleam in my eye. Rarely, are we parents presented with such glorious moments of vindication.
"Look at this!" I said, waving the list triumphantly.
"Maybe you should look at it, Mom," Brandon said.
I eyeballed the list for the first time. Dang! Just as Brandon claimed, "everyone" did have a cell phone, except for him.
I scribbled N/A beside Brandon's name, which, of course stood for "Neanderthal Adult."
I admit it. I'm a dinosaur from the dark ages of Atari and eight-track tapes. Just recently, I learned that nobody listens to Walkmans anymore; it's all about iPods. My son tells me an iPod is an MP3 player (as if this clears everything up) but it all sounds sinister to me. Isn't a "pod" what's left over when your body's been snatched?
I finally gathered the courage to venture into a cell phone store. The salesperson held up a silver, space-age gizmo for my inspection.
"This has a VGA camera and video recording, XHTML browsing, MMS, Java MIDP 2.0, local/remote SyncML, e-mail, EGPRS, and MIDI."
"All of that?" I marveled. "In that tiny little phone?" I paused and cast my gaze at the other customers in the store. They don't all look like MIT graduates. Am I the only one who isn't getting this?
"Do you perhaps have one of those quaint boxy models from the '80s that simply makes phone calls?"
I ended up buying the most stripped-down phone in the store, but it still had about 100 features. Apparently there is no such thing as minimalism in the world of cell phones.
I proudly presented the phone to Brandon. "The Gillespie family has entered the wireless age."
"Great," he said. "And this phone allows text-messaging."
"What?"
"You can type messages to your friends."
"Why would you want to do that when you can simply phone them?"
"Mom, everybody text messages. Nobody calls people anymore."
"Then why in the world did we get a cell phone?"
He slung an arm over my shoulder. "Face it, Mom, you'll never understand technology."
Augusta resident Karin Gillespie is the author of Bet Your Bottom Dollar. She can be reached through her Web site at www.karingillespie.com.
