Last week my daughter looked over my shoulder and said, in that inimitable way daughters have of talking to their mothers, “MOM” exasperatingly sighing and shaking her head. This reaction from her was because of my inability to manipulate the “joystick” on my new cell phone. It is a teeny button that jumps around with the teeniest of motions that is practically impossible to control — especially within the first hour of possession.

OMG — I felt like reminding my daughter that when I wanted to call my BFF, it was from the one phone that we had in the house; a clunky black model with a real dial and that was on a party line with no less than two other families, sometimes as many as five. Those were the days of call packs — you picked a map inside the phone book of areas where you mostly called and were billed a flat rate for that pack. Since the phone was smack dab in the middle of the dining room, everyone could hear everything that was said, in spite of trying to whisper (the entire room suddenly got very quiet). So the inevitable questions came ad nauseam: “What time are you leaving for the game? Who all is going?” Incidentally, IMHO (in my humble opinion), that is precisely why all of us were all too happy to flee the nest. That one phone in a common area that resulted in TMQ (too many questions), whereas today, it appears to be the opposite. Lots of boomeranging.

The “rates” went down at 5 p.m. Today, should my phone ring right after 5, it is certain to be my elderly aunts from Wisconsin or my son asking if I am going to cook dinner. Yes, we had day rates and night rates.

When I finally did get a phone of my own, it was an extension phone, not a separate line. In an effort to talk to my friends late at night, I put the phone under my pillow as I was dialing so as to muffle the sound of the dial as it sped around dialing numbers like VAnderbilt 7-2972.

The romance of those old phone numbers … Telephone numbers used to begin with two letters, then five numbers. The letters represented numbers on the keypad. It must have been a genius who came up with all of the elegant-sounding names: VAnderbilt 7 later translated to 827. “Call NOrthside 777” is a film starring Jimmy Stewart based on a true story of a man wrongly convicted of murder. This was the first film shot in Chicago. The year was 1948. The exchange in La Grange and La Grange Park was FLeetwood-352 or -354.

We baby boomers have traveled at warp speed to today’s technology. When we were in high school in the advanced math classes (the ones I wasn’t in), the students used slide rules. There were no calculators — you used other methods to add, subtract, multiply and divide. We learned carrying to the tens, moving the decimal point, all by hand, using our sharpened No. 2 yellow lead pencils.

I realize it is impossible for our kids to understand that an icon was in fact a religious symbol, a mouse was a little rodent you did not want in the house, a computer was someone who computed answers, a keyboard was part of a piano, a desk top was in fact the top of a desk that usually had a blotter on it to absorb the ink from fountain pens. Okay, we had ballpoint pens, but blotters died a slow death.

But, hey, I think we are doing a phenomenal job considering from whence we came. So, with that, it’s been gr8 and hope to CU soon. TTYL. (talk to you later)