Writing it Down - Judy Albietz

Lily hunched her cell phone up on her left shoulder as she looked around for a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. She wanted to write down the hotel contact information. For some reason she didn’t feel comfortable entering the information on her cell phone or even on her new ITouch. What if these devices crashed? Ever since she got the new ITouch last week, she had kept it separate from her Blackberry. As if she didn’t want them to contaminate each other. If one died at least the other would be working. But ever since she saw that the website for the Leadership Conference had gone down, she had a bad feeling about Internet communication. What if none of these things worked? So she would just write down the information. Then she wouldn’t have to worry about an electricity outage or servers being hacked. She found an old envelope on the kitchen table and fished a ballpoint pen out of the corner of the drawer where the phone book was kept. Yes, that was another thing people didn’t use anymore.

Before he left for Chicago, she and Josh made plans to keep up with each other. He loved to text, even better than talking. He complained she didn’t check her incoming texts often enough. She promised to return his texts as soon as she could. But she couldn’t guarantee she would stay glued to her phone like he did.

As Lily jotted down the hotel address on the back of the envelope, she thought how she liked the feel of the pen in her hand—pressing against her fingers. No, she’d probably never get as good a callous on the third finger of her right hand as her mother’s. Her mom had told her how it used to be blue-stained with all those years of fountain pens. Now even her mother was thumb-typing notes to herself on her cell phone.