Which means she was sleeping on the job -- not at her post to do the kindergarten checklist she wisely goes through every time I’m standing at the door ready to leave the house.
I did have my “brown thing,” our agreed-on term for what I call my wallet. She refuses to call my wallet because of her passionate belief that it’s a billfold instead. (One of these days when I use “w” word she’s going to snap and say: “Do you eat with that mouth?”)
The upshot of all this is that I left the house without my phone – this after texting my daughter and son-in-law that I’d text them when I got to Springboro High School when I arrive to pick up our grandson, Atticus, from a wrestling meet.
He was scheduled to stay overnight and spend Presidents Day with us – a day on which he would repeatedly ask his Grandmother when dinner was ready, knowing full well that, in her life, dinner is served at noon and supper in the evening.
Finney, the other grandson, also inherited the annoying gene from me. As regular readers will recall, he’s still in the toddler phase of the disorder, meaning that his most enduring childhood memory may be singing “Grandma got run over by reindeer” while doing the toddler smirk.
The pediatrician assures us he’s developing as normally as possible, given the family genome.
Of course, the real solution to my forgetting the phone problem would be for me to march to the basement, disconnect the curly cord from the rotary dial phone that hangs on a post there, wrap the cord around my neck and super glue it to both me and the phone.
It’s sobering for me to think that’s a sane solution to anything.
So, at breakfast, one of my aforementioned buds let me borrow a Smart phone, and then looked on as my blood pressure spiked when I was unable to dial a number because I didn’t’ know how to make the numbers appear so I could leave my daughter a voice mail and tell her my planned arrival time, so she could add 10 minutes to that and have a decent idea as when I’d actually arrive.
In my brief pre-dial meltdown, only a reptilian flick of the tongue stopped a speck of drool from descending from my mouth and revealing to others the level of panic that was sucking me down a psychological wormhole in which I was asking myself a fundamental question about our society: If the movie were made today, would E.T. even be able to call home?
When I left the restaurant, I was going to check the quickest route to Springboro, but, duh, I didn’t have my phone to shout out directions. So, using auditory hallucinations alone, I took 72 south to 35, west to toward Dayton and south on I-675 to Austin Landing.
Even though the phone wasn’t there to hector me, I knew about 10 minutes into the drive, I’d be about five minutes late. Still, I controlled my speed and didn’t join the Formula 1 minivan race being held on 675 and televised, presumably, on ESPN 8, The Ocho.
Of course, I took the wrong turn into Springboro High and wondered why there weren’t any cars in the parking lot for the meet the younger grandson, Finney, would be wrestling in that day. But after snaking between buildings and driving past a gate that blessedly was open, I came around a curve, saw signs of human life and had enough of my half-wits about me to realize there probably was a better way to get there from here than driving down the embankment in front of me – particularly without a four-wheel drive vehicle.
So, I backed up, cleverly located a paved route to my destination, parked, and, while walking in the sunshine toward the athletics building saw Atticus and son-in-law, Jason, emerge into the sunlight.
When I asked how long they’d been waiting, Jason – knowing full well that I was severely overcaffeinated from breakfast -- told me he’d been waiting half an hour, then smirked like Finney does when he sings “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”
Atticus then piled on, asking me whether the phone I forgot was the green one. My wife and I are locked in another standoff over the color of my phone, which is blue, but which she calls green, though in an effort to save our 47-year marriage, is now calling teal. Call me paranoid, but I’m pretty sure our daughter’s on her side, too.
I’m beginning to think my life would be a lot better if I just lost the phone – I mean, permanently –before I have to download the app that tells me in the midst of the phone panic attack that my blood pressure is dangerously high and saying its analytics indicate I’m thinking about E.T.
Some days, I close my eyes, hear John Lennon singing the song “Imagine” and go back through the mists of time to the days when – over a dial telephone – a grandpa could tell his daughter “I’ll be there about 11:30 Eastern Grandpa Time to pick up Atticus. Keep an eye out for me.”
The dream ends when she says: “Gotta go, Dad, I’ve got E.T. on hold.”
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