I have slowly been getting over the loss of my dear Grandma Flippy flip phone. It was very difficult in the beginning. My new screen was too big, I didn’t have easy access to dial 911 if I felt I was being followed. I didn’t understand what all of the different beeps and dings meant. But, I am reasonably intelligent (only reasonably) and I began to learn how much fun owning an iPhone could be. I could annoy my boys with pictures and Facebook comments, I now have learned the art of Snapchat and I can send them 10-second videos of me doing interesting things like walking around Votee Park or food shopping. If they thought I was irritating before, this phone allows for a whole new level of parental annoyance. This makes me oh-so-happy.

I am going to let you all in on a little secret. On my first day of high school, I saw a boy and my first crush began. Going to a new school is confusing enough, but put a new, cute boy into the mix and you become a pile of unexplainable emotions. I didn’t know what to do about this crush. There was no texting or instagramming or snapchatting. There was pen and paper. I wrote a note, “Dear so and so, I think you are the cutest boy in the school. Love, Anonymous.” And then I put it in his locker. I am not kidding and I know that many of you reading this know about this incident because even though I was younger in high school, I was still a little unhinged. Eventually the boy found out it was me. But not before I found out his phone number and I would call to hear his manly voice and then hang up because I was too embarrassed to speak to him. If there was texting back then, it would have been so much easier. Kids these days have entire relationships without uttering a word. They don’t even have to make eye contact. Unrequited love would have been so much easier with an iPhone. But, I was born at the wrong time. I was born at the time between the rotary phone and “car phone” that was actually attached to your car. But, we managed and it was fine.

This brings us to today. Well, not actually today, last week. Son #2 was walking home from minyan (of course) and his phone slipped out of his hands. The phone was well protected by his OtterBox and when he picked up the phone and saw that the screen was still in perfect shape, he thought the OtterBox did its job. Nope, it didn’t. His iPhone was a goner. After calling OtterBox, we found out they will send us a new case, but there is nothing they can do about the phone. What a surprise.

Met with several geniuses at the Apple store and that was an exercise in futility. In this day and age, your life revolves around your phone contract and we were in contract purgatory. Four months left, what to do, what to do. We bought the cheapest iphone, which will come unlocked, which is what you need your phone to be before you go to Israel for the year—that’s what they tell me, I have no idea what anyone is talking about most of the time. New SIM card, old sim card—don’t even know what a SIM card is. All son #2 and I knew what that (1) he has a really great personality when his face isn’t constantly in his phone, and I was really enjoying the fact that his phone wasn’t working. Sorry kid, it’s true. And (2) we needed to find a phone he could use before we received the phone we ordered.

Now that I am a Facebook expert, stalker, whatever, I posted a plea for an old iPhone that had AT&T compatibility. Several friends came through, so that was genuinely heartwarming and now son #2 has his head in a phone, again. While we all anxiously await his “space gray” phone to arrive in the mail.

So kids, the lesson here is that even though all of this new technology is awesome, sometimes, we grown-ups miss the simple times. The times when you had a conversation with someone, when you had to listen to your parents tell you stories about their childhoods, when you had to walk uphill, both ways, in the snow without shoes. All you have to do now it make a 10-second snapchat story about about your day, watch it once, and then it disappears like it never happened. Memories do happen, and it so important that you hold on to the good ones and even some of the embarrassing ones. It is what makes us who we are.

By Banji Latkin Ganchrow

Banji Ganchrow is sort of annoyed that a phone could break so easily. Those folks at Apple really know what they are doing and they know there is nothing we can do about it!