ShareThisEAST HADDAM, Conn. - Jack Crawford, my maternal grandfather, didn't use the telephone. It annoyed him. He did his palavering face to face. He never learned to drive, either, saying he didn't want to be bothered putting the damned thing in the garage at night. Nor was Jack big on television. He read books, by Shakespeare, Dickens and that lot.
When my brothers and I visited him and our grandmother in the summer, there was no TV set on the premises. We were expected to entertain ourselves outside, out of sight. We caught crabs, biked and collected reusable bottles by the side of the road to pay for vanilla Cokes in town.
Not exactly a chatterbox as an octogenarian, Jack was worth listening to when he chose to hold forth. He told us how he made the acquaintance of Sitting Bull and about the time the lobsters escaped from the kitchen. He remembered where he was the day President James A. Garfield was shot. He had sat once within spitting distance of Queen Victoria. Jack's stories wouldn't have traveled well across the phone lines.
I drive, watch TV and use the land line some, but I don't own a cell phone or a cell-phone holster. I don't covet my neighbor's iPhone apps. My son's friends look at me as if I'd announced that I prefer a corncob to Scott's paper products. Who knows what they're calling me while I'm in the john.
We Americans sure talk a lot nowadays, a condition exacerbated by the ubiquitous cell phone. We talk in the car, on the treadmill, as we're shopping or walking in the woods. We talk during movies and sermons. A congressman and a Supreme Court justice talked in the audience while the president was giving his last State of the Union address. I suspect one reason we're reading less, at least anything longer than a Tweet, is that it's hard to talk and read at the same time.
We don't talk to one another, we talk past each other, and not just inside the Beltway. We all know people who couldn't be bothered listening to anyone but themselves. I was at Mass not too long ago, and the priest, who was totally old-school, gave a sermon on the proper way for parishioners to comport themselves during the Eucharist. The subsequent performance of his flock at Communion was a stunning rebuke: If anyone had listened to a word he had just said, they must have left early (which the faithful are wont to do in these enlightened times).
I once sat behind two fellows on a train traveling from Connecticut to Washington, D.C., and they talked the entire way, nonstop, without so much as a pregnant pause. At first I was annoyed. Then I was enthralled. Could they keep this effluvial blather up? Would they be immortalized in the Guinness Book of World Records? In the end, I lost interest. They weren't discussing anything meaty, like whether there is Wi-Fi in heaven. Nutritionally speaking, the dialogue was Cheetos floating in warm Hawaiian Punch. Besides, it was soon clear they could do this all the way to the Pacific, easy as pie. For this pair, talking was as natural as breathing. It was the one time I wished I owned an iPod.
I have a confession: I'm on Linkedin at work (they "suggested" I sign up). Boy, am I ever connected: A guy I went to elementary school with linked right in and tried to sell me long-term-care insurance.
While I wasn't paying attention, it got well beyond Facebook and Twitter. There's Loopt, Digg and Fark (not that South American terrorist group, as far as I know), to name just a few. My personal favorite is Yelp. Are we Yelping yet? I don't know about you, but I could use a good Yelp.
(David Holahan is a freelance writer who lives in East Haddam, Conn. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)
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