The invention of the smartphone has resolved a primeval fear of our species: What do you do when you’re out in public and forgot to bring something to read? Until a few years ago, the thought of facing a subway train, or the line at an ATM, or the waiting room at the Jiffy Lube, launched a primordial fear shrieking from the deeps of the reptilian brain.
No newspaper, no magazine, no book? Fool! Now you may have to look up from your lap! You may have to make eye contact! Talk to strangers!
The nightmarish possibilities were never far from mind.
With the smartphone, all such nightmares are gone. Its pixels or whatever you call them can store all the books and newspapers and magazines you could ever want to read in a Jiffy Lube.
That’s the good part. Yet once in a while I miss the old order of things, and I see the advantage of those simpler, predigital times, back when everyone understood you’d have to be nuts to enter a Bob Evans Restaurant for breakfast without a folded newspaper under your arm if you’ve only packed one pair of pants.
A case in point. One recent morning I was far from home and needed a quick bite to eat, and across the highway from my motel a Bob Evans Restaurant beckoned, with its Golden Cornmeal Mush Breakfast, its Sunshine Skillet, its Griddle Combo. . .
Soon I was seated at the counter with my back to the other diners, holding a menu the size of the Magna Carta. It shimmered with lurid photos of pancakes dripping syrup and animal fat, of pork sausage rounds sizzling with gristle from the Sunshine Skillet.
The waitress was efficient in the Bob Evans tradition, and before I knew it I was gazing on a platter heaped with fluffy eggs and hash browns. I set aside my smartphone, which was filled with news about major league spring training. In my excitement I reached for the squeeze bottle of ketchup, gripped it in both hands, aimed it hurriedly over the potatoes, and squirted several large gobbets directly into my lap.
As the waitress passed by, I said, “I squirted ketchup all over my pants.”
She nodded.
“By accident,” I said. “I did it by accident.”
“Of course you did, hon,” she said. With a quick pirouette she grabbed a fistful of paper napkins and dropped them next to my plate. An extra glass of water appeared, for dousing.
The restaurant was packed with happy customers, and discreetly I went to work scrubbing my lap, recalling that this was the only pair of pants I had bothered to pack for my brief trip. The ketchup smeared sideways and the water from the napkin sank deep into the fabric, and then the napkin began to shred, leaving a layer of paper filament stretched across my front. I rubbed more, hard. I was mid-rub when I thought what I must look like from the back, hunched on my stool and rubbing my lap with both hands, sideways and up and down and then sideways again, and I sat bolt upright.
“The napkins aren’t working,” I told the waitress.
“It’ll dry eventually, sweetheart.”
I returned to my farm-fresh eggs with dying enthusiasm. I cast glances at my smartphone but spring training couldn’t hold my interest. I ate what I could, paid while seated at the counter, and assessed my lap again. Even as the water dried the stains remained: large, uneven discolorations, centered on the flap of my zipper and outspreading like a map of the Finger Lakes.
Thirty paces and perhaps forty customers separated me from the front doors, which just then swung open. A high school girls’ soccer team tumbled in, rosy from morning practice, giggling.
The lesson here is obvious. The digital age has its snares like every other age. In an earlier era I would have brought the Wall Street Journal to read at breakfast. Then, after covering my lap in ketchup, I could have folded the broadsheet and dangled it casually over my midsection as I parted my way through the giggling gaggle of girls. I might even have clowned with them a bit, avuncular-like, and nodded warmly as I headed to my car.
And now? “I need a menu to take home,” I told the waitress. The menu was as large as a broadsheet, larger than my shorts—a supersize Bob Evans codpiece.
Her friendliness vanished, as if I’d gotten Bob’s prize porker in a hammerlock and put a pistol to its head.
“No, you cannot.”
So I stood up, smoothed my dampened pants front, elevated my gaze, and walked on, a martyr to the digital age. By the time I reached the door the girls had gone completely quiet.
