I made a phone call to my mother a couple weeks ago using Google Voice. I sat at my kitchen table and chatted into my computer. It was the coolest thing.

Mind you, it’s mainly cool because for the last  5 or 6 years I’ve been with AT&T. During that time, I’ve not been able to use the phone in my house. I’ve had to stand in the street to make a call. Yakking on the phone at my kitchen table in my pajamas, with a cuppa and unkempt hair? What a luxury.

The farm in Oklahoma where my mom grew up didn’t have electricity, let alone a phone, until 1949. When I told her I was talking on the computer, my mom laughed. “It’s a far cry from the days when I was a little girl. If we wanted to talk on the telephone, we had to walk a few miles to the one farm that had a phone. That phone was an old hand-crank phone you had to yell into.”

Last week I got a super duper smart phone, a Droid X that does just about everything except wash my car.  And yes, I can use it in the house, at the kitchen table, to make phone calls! 

We are all shaking our heads at the wonder of it, and a Paul Simon song has been ear-worming my head ever since I got this silly phone.

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry