Almost But Not Quite

Mailbox, Slightly Askew - Diggs, VA, December 2010

My father, bless his heart, is not exactly on the cutting edge of technology, although he does have a cell phone and knows how to use it.  (Except not for texting.)

My dear mother has a cell phone which is always turned off and most of the time located on the middle shelf of her china cabinet. This cell phone is for emergencies only, as in only if the emergency happens to her in the china cabinet area.

The inability to embrace technology in this family (myself included) comes from age an extremely limited exposure to anything invented after the VCR CD DVD player.

Change is not something people around here welcome with open arms, in case yesterday's post about traveling to the post office rather than enjoying free home delivery is not example enough. 

Also, I would probably still be climbing up a telephone pole to make a call on dial-up internet right now, here in the 21st century, if a lightning bolt hadn't taken out my modem, but this is not about my inability to understand embrace technology, it's about my father and his willingness to keep up with technology - on his own terms. 

All these rapid technological advances can be confusing, especially for someone who really doesn't use a computer and to this day has no answering machine or voice mail system hooked up to the land line gets by just fine without it.

This confusion, paired with a sincere attempt to keep up with everything, has produced some new words used almost daily by the Chesapeake Bay Family, all courtesy of my father:

Flaptop = My father's word for laptop.

Spacebook = Facebook or My Space or whatever.

Yesterday after work, I received a text from my son, the 15-year-old Technical Guru in this family. Without him I would not know what an ipod was and would not be addicted to Angry Birds.

My parents were picking him up from high school.  My daughter's basketball game had been cancelled due to the wintry weather, but since I was at work I didn't know any of this until I received the following text message on my cell phone:

"Hey, Chesapeake Bay Daughter doesn't have a game, but she has practice that ends at 5.  Grandaddy told me to send you a fax to let you know.  (He meant text.)"

Indeed he did.

And indeed I laughed.

Are we the only ones or are there others out there struggling to keep up with the pace of technological advances up to and including the fax machine i-pods netbooks  Netflix i-phones?