Here I am after more than three-quarters of a century looking back at some of the changes that occurred during that lifetime. The biggest technical change is the explosion of personal data devices. I did not get a cell phone until about twenty years ago. I was one of those people who said, “I’ll NEVER have a cell phone!!” I considered them an intrusion. I resisted and resisted. Then it became obvious that a cell phone was a necessary accompaniment to my daily lifestyle.

At the time my mother had moved to Tucson and was in need of close attention. She lived on her own but was in her 80s and had moved from the town where she lived for most of her life, away from lifelong friends and familiar places. She needed contact not only for personal needs and information about how to get around a new town, but also for company. My work took me out of the office, so I was not always available by landline. I believed she would find friends fairly quickly but, in the meantime, I was her social link, her sounding board, her complaint department, her connection to the world.

I discovered I needed a cell phone for business. Ken and I had just started a property management and real estate company and the need for quick exchanges of information became evident. So there I was, a new and reluctant cell phone user.

Looking way back…In the mid-1980s my family of three teenagers, two dogs, my husband and I, left our home in Bellevue Washington to travel the country. We journeyed through the forty-eight contiguous states plus a couple of Canadian Provinces and Mexican states for fourteen months. We took two of our kids out of high school (the third had just graduated). They wanted to keep up their studies while traveling so they could stay up in grade with their friends when we returned. That was accomplished with a study program coordinated by the University of Missouri and Bellevue High School. Correspondence courses were mailed (years before email) to us by the University and then back to the University as they completed each section and results were reported to their high school. All communication was by public phone in phone booths across the country and by mail, snail mail. Lots of postage. We had no cell phone and no computer. We were off the grid so to speak. Amazingly they were able to complete their studies in English, History, Math, and Social Studies – the basics, while learning firsthand about our beautiful country, its regions, its national parks, its varied cultures and languages (English has many nuances), history and geography. We took advantage of public libraries and museums along the way. Being teenagers imprisoned with their parents 24/7 for fourteen months, traveling in a van, living in a travel trailer, was indeed a sentence few would volunteer for. The only “device” they had for entertainment were Walkman cassette players with earphones. Those were revolutionary in that time. It was their means of escape into personal head space. I must give them all credit for their stalwart determination to survive. I’m sure it felt to them akin to traveling by covered wagon across the country. We crisscrossed the country from sea to shining sea four times in our quest to visit every state. How did we manage without a cell phone, GPS, the internet?

My how times have changed. Now the idea of leaving my house without a fully charged cell phone makes me quake with anxiety. What if something breaks down, what if my (fill in the blank) _________, husband, friend, daughter, grandson, needs to talk to me, an emergency, what if I get lost and need direction? What if, what if, what if?  I can hardly believe the intense change from being a NEVER-CELLPHONER to being a NEVER-BE- WITHOUT-A-CELLPHONER.

Technology has certainly changed my life. For better?