I don’t like to think that I’m middle-aged, but it’s true. Today, I got a telemarketing call wanting to talk to me about my Medicare Advantage plan. I made her repeat it before I realized what she was asking me. “I’m not that old yet!” I shouted and hung up the phone. Okay, I was probably a little more polite, but afterward, it hit me how quickly the years are flying by.
Maybe I’m feeling my age because we just wrapped up a 10-day visit with our teenage nieces and nephew, visiting from the land of 10,000 lakes and even more mosquitoes. This was the first time we’d spent so much time with each other. I’ll admit there were some learning curves as we navigated sleep schedules, movie and food preferences, car music, plus a busy holiday weekend filled with a rodeo, fireworks, and a parade.
We fit in as much as we could, convincing our youngest niece to wear the sweltering Lions Club mascot costume in the Frontier Days parade, where she waved to the crowd from the back of my dad’s yellow truck. Occasionally, she’d poke the straw of her smoothie up the lion’s nose, her yellow mittens gripping the drink awkwardly. This move seemed to delight the kids. “Look, the lion is drinking!” one young boy shrieked to his friends as we passed by.
Our oldest niece took a flying leap chasing her brother through the gravel parking lot in Jerome. She limped through the rest of the trip with a sprained ankle and some impressive bruises. Our nephew decided on his last afternoon here, he really needed to hike the Granite Dells. I reminded him it was 94 degrees outside, but he was sure we’d be fine. Sigh. I put on hiking boots, filled a backpack with as much water and Gatorade as I could carry, and off we went.
Throughout their visit, I’ll admit I was secretly annoyed by the hours they spent swiping their fingers across their phone screens. We drove to Jerome and Sedona, but each time I looked in the rear-view mirror, their heads were down, looking at their phones. Still, it reminded me of summer vacations almost 40 years ago when my sister and I tuned out the world listening to The Go-Go’s on our Walkmans while reading teen fashion magazines. Mom would turn around from the front seat and wave her hands to get our attention. “Girls, look at the beautiful mountains we’re driving through,” she’d say, and we’d pause the cassette, look out the window, agree it was beautiful, and go back to what we’d been doing.
On our last night together, we cooked dinner and invited my dad to join us. After the meal was done, I pulled out my phone and dug through Facebook photos, showing them pictures of their grandpa as a young boy in Wisconsin, along with photos of their great-grandparents. We passed the phone around the table as Grandpa told stories about the people in each photo we pulled up. The kids asked questions, and we laughed and talked. And while they consider Facebook a place for old folks like me to hang out, they asked for the links to my photo albums so they could dig through the pieces of their ancestry I store there.
On our drive down to the airport, they tagged us in photos on their Instagram accounts and texted us updates as they waited for their plane. Later, it was a Facetime video chat to tell us they made it safely home. I may not love the amount of time they spend on their phones, but I am grateful for the ways it keeps us connected. And I wonder in 40 years what their nephews and nieces will be doing on their summer vacation.