Roots and Chords

On the road a la Jetsons

I am writing this while sitting at the dining room table of one of my oldest and dearest friends, one more temporary home along this path of travel. Just so many beads on a 24-day-long chain. It’s amazing to me to think that this is how Dan and I used to live for weeks on end, back in my touring days. As much as that now seems more like a past life than just part of my own story, I have to admit that I have had a fairly easy time settling into this traveling rhythm. Somewhere in my cells it is a familiar groove.

So. Right here in this paragraph – indeed, in my very next sentence – I am going to tell you something, straight out. I GOT AN ANDROID . Not only that, I added APPS. Many of them. And, though a few weeks ago I would have proclaimed from my very own soap box that I can easily do without such new-fangled high-tech toys, thank you very much, um, it has actually been kind of, well, fun. Chloe and I used it to determine whether gas was cheaper on this or that side of the Colorado-Kansas line (we saved around $3 by waiting until we crossed into Kansas), it led us to the most fantastic restaurant that serves locally-grown and meticulously prepared cuisine (715 in Lawrence, KS), as well as helping us find our way to more than one cleverly elusive destination. It has accurately predicted the weather so I could dress for 70 or 95 degrees (though it couldn’t turn down the insidious overdose of air conditioning once we were inside the building – more on that in some future post. Hopefully they’ll come up with an app for that soon.) It has made it a piece of cake to keep up with my emails. It has located and navigated our path to Whole Foods, music stores, Target, and more. One app supplied us with quotations from famous people for our presentations. I know what the date is every day on the Jewish calendar. If I had figured out how to use it in time (and remembered where it was hiding), I could have helped my teacher by running the stopwatch when we needed it during one class session. I have taken countless pictures and emailed them to Dan and my mother and a college friend of Chloe’s (except it turned out she [Chloe] gave me the wrong person’s email address, so we are actually not sure who received the not-so-scenic view of Salina, Kansas. No offense to any Salinians out there.) And in case you are interested, I am facing southeast at 145 degrees right now, a minor but accurate fact imparted to me by said droid.

Oh. AND I have made and received phone calls on it. Which is, of course, what I got it for to begin with, though it is all too easy to forget that, when trying to figure out how to use all the other stuff, as mentioned above.

Gone are the old days. Dan and I can remember countless occasions when we had to be near a pay phone at a specific time on a specific day for a radio interview or to call a hard-to-reach contact, way back in the 1980s when we drove for all my tours. It was often next to impossible to find a phone when we needed it. Do you ever have one of those dreams where you finally find the phone booth only to discover it is out of order, or someone is already using it, or the buttons don’t work right or you don’t have the right amount of change or your long distance calling card somehow doesn’t work? Or the temperature is either ten below or 95 and humid? It was like that more often than you might guess. I will never forget the time when we called our answering machine from the back office of one of my gigs, and heard a message from our neighbor that was cut off in the middle: “So we don’t want you to worry, and the police came, but they told us—“ It was just like one of those nightmares – I couldn’t get our long distance card to work, the connection kept getting interrupted, and I was frantically dialing (we actually had a “dialer” that we carried around to beep the tones into phones that still had dials) while Dan and I were picturing our front door broken down or our house burnt to the ground. (In the end, it turned out okay, but the stress of getting through to our neighbor took at least eighteen months off my life.) None of this would have happened if we had had cell phones back then.

And now a word from my devil’s advocate, or old self, take your pick.

By sometime in the 90s Dan used all the evidence from the above adrenaline-sucking paragraph to try to convince me of the virtues of an (early) cell phone. I agreed with him that having one in our possession could spare us – or at least reduce the frequency of – the nightmarish challenges of keeping up with communications while being on the road. In my very next breath I always went on to say – and here comes my actual soap box moment (just a warning) – that maybe it turns out that it’s actually good for us to have some private time. Maybe it’s all for the better that there are times that nobody knows where we are or how to reach us. Yes, I can turn my android off, but it’s possible that even just knowing that someone could be calling or emailing me keeps one tiny set of neurons on alert when they should be taking their twenty-minute power nap or meditating on a mantra that bears no resemblance to a handheld superpower device.

So while I’m happy to have this new instrument from the Star Trek era in my employ, I still feel uncomfortable with the fact that our host for this Friday night reached me when I happened to be shopping for lead refills for my No. 7 mechanical pencil and a backpack last night. And while I was able to carry on a perfectly coherent conversation with her as I navigated the aisles of the mega-store, it’s just plain weird that she didn’t have to know where I was while we were pinning down the parameters of tomorrow’s visit. I find it on the edge of icky when a woman in the stall or dressing room next to mine is chatting with someone I cannot see. (Granted, I cannot see the woman in the stall or dressing room next to mine either, but I know you know what I’m getting at. Please don’t let me lose my momentum here.)

When we were kids, my brother and I watched the Jetsons on television together. We wanted what they had – the TV-screen phones, the instant food, the remote camera intercoms, etc. – so bad we could taste it. While I know we have not gotten as far as flying cars (thank goodness – can you imagine bad or raging drivers filling the airways in addition to the highways?) we are using a lot of things that look like Jetson imitations as it is. My android is teaching me that it can be fun, just as that happy animated family from the future made it seem. But I also want to remind all of us that the Jetsons had their daily life issues, as do we all. George, Jane, Judy, and Elroy had all manner of things to contend with at home, at school, and in the workplace, which was what the episodes were REALLY about, even if my brother and I missed the so called point. It’s not how I call Dan every day, it’s the fact that I do get to talk to him. It’s not how we found the gas station, it’s that we are fortunate enough to be able to afford to pay for this trip so that I can develop further in my profession, and also so that Chloe and Rachel and I can enjoy being together in our respective musical endeavors, re-connecting with several old friends, and making new friends along the way. I am glad to have my droid’s help so that perhaps I am less frazzled when I get there! But let me remember that the tool, no matter how seductive, is still just a tool.