I was stretched out in bed beside Kindra Friday night when I noticed she had posted on Facebook about her crawfish etouffee and Cajun music.
We’d had the house to ourselves that evening, so she made the etouffee and had Cajun music playing in the background when I got home.
The etouffee was so good, I ate two full servings, and, even though I can’t understand a word of Cajun French, I enjoyed the music enough that I almost went on Amazon to buy an accordion. It was a good night. I guar-on-tee, as notable Cajun Justin Wilson used to say.
So I posted a response: “It was spectacular.”
Maybe a minute later, she pecked a few keys on her phone and posted a response: “I’m glad you liked it.”
How very 2022 of us, I thought. We were three inches from each other and exchanged messages that flew from our phones off to wherever Facebook lives, bounced off their server and came back to us in the warmth of our bed.
For the record, I had already told her maybe eight times how much I liked the etouffee. And, as Andy Griffith said: “Eatin’ speaks louder than words.”
It’s a cliché now how people will sit across a table from each other and keep their eyes and attention on their phones, but the experience Kindra and I had Friday shows how deeply ingrained phones and iPads and tablets and what have you have become in our lives.
The Cajun music on Friday was being played by Alexa, which is a hard-to-describe device that Kindra ordered early this year.
Alexa responds to commands and executes them almost immediately, as long as they don’t require arms or legs.
“Alexa, play some Hank Williams,” I said just now, as a test. Within 10 seconds, she was playing Jambalaya, which, curiously, was topically appropriate.
Kindra uses Alexa to maintain her shopping list.
“Alexa, add dog food to the shopping list.” “Alexa, add corn meal to the shopping list.” It synchronizes with Kindra’s phone, so she can carry the shopping list to the store.
And, you can tell Alexa to remind you to feed the hamsters or take out the trash.
Some years ago, daughter Brooke and I made an eight-day, 11-state road trip to Minnesota, over to Indiana, down to Kentucky and then home. There were a few peeks at the trusty Rand-McNally to find the Mall of America, our hotel in Chicago and then Graceland, but that was about it.
The rest of the trip was navigated by road signs, a bit of dead reckoning and a few queries at gas stations. We found Bill Monroe’s childhood home high above Rosine, Ky., with minimal trouble and located a specific Waffle House in Louisville.
These days, I use GPS even on trips to Oklahoma City. Part of it, I admit, is a competitive desire to beat the original Estimated Time of Arrival on the GPS, but I worry that I am gradually losing my ability to find places.
I frequently work on the newspaper from home on weekends and when the weather is lousy. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I can design pages, get pictures ready for the press, writes stories and do just about everything I can do at my desk in the office.
It is an age of electronic miracles.
But I worry that we’ll come to a day when the miracles quit working, when we can’t tell a machine to add flour to the shopping list or ask another machine how to get somewhere in the next county. What happens when GMO crops lose their resistance to pesticides and herbicides and when the Internet breaks down?
Can we go back, even temporarily, to a world without Youtube, email, Facebook, Tiktok or GPS?