A month ago, Dwayne's father, who is 86, fell off a chair and cracked his hip. It doesn't require surgery but it pains him a lot and makes getting around difficult. He can't do stairs nor can he drive. So this means we haven't been able to have Donn and Mary here for supper. I got the bright idea, then, that for the last long weekend of summer, before the kids head back to school, we'd surprise them with a family BBQ.
We told them that we'd bring supper down on Sunday evening, that we'd be there around 4 o'clock. Then we told everyone else to arrive at the same time with a salad of some kind. So Donn and Mary were surprised and we ate chips and drank pop and BBQ'd hamburgers and hot dogs and ate potato salad and baked beans and coleslaw and broccoli salad then had ice cream cones for dessert.
The kids played washer toss, the adults played washer toss. Abby was there, running around, being remarkably good. The sun stayed out, the seagulls circled overhead, Mary wasn't mad even though she doesn't like surprises and Donn was kept grinning like a rat eatin' rhubarb.
And through it all, there wasn't a phone to be seen.
My mother pointed this out to me this morning. Because I don't have a smart phone, I only notice them when they are present. To me, the absence of phones doesn't register. Yet I would have noticed the girls playing washer toss while clutching a phone in one hand; I would have noticed M. keeping her head down as she texted; I would have noticed someone wandering off, talking into a phone pressed to his ear.
It is possible to interact with the world, even as small a world as our little family BBQ, without a phone in use. This is not an anti-phone rant (in fact, I'm getting a tablet in order to read magazines because I'm tired of the piles cluttering my living room) because I think smart phones are smart. But I think they also waste a lot of time and energy and focus. We're living a lot less now that more of our life is caught up in these phones.
We had four generations gathered together again last night. We do it a lot but you never know when that will change. It was far better for those four kids to play washer toss with each other and with their fathers and uncles than it was to sit for hours playing with silly apps.