BY BRUCE APAR
MAYOR, PENNYSAVER COMMUNITY

MOM CULTURE: Pop, remember when we used to talk to each other?

POP CULTURE: Didn’t know we stopped, Mom.

MC: I mean on the phone.

PC: It hasn’t all gone to seed. You still talk to me when I’m on the phone – with someone else.

MC: Why is that?

PC: I don’t know. You tell me why you talk to me when I’m speaking with someone on the phone, Mom.It’s one of the great mysteries of our 48-1/2-year union.

MC: Not that you’re counting or anything.

PC: I only count the blissful years, Dear. All 48-1/2 of ‘em.

MC: Well, I meant why is it that people don’t talk on the phone like we used to?

PC: Oh, my gosh. That’s one of the easiest ones you’ve thrown my way in a month of Sundays.

MC: OK, show me what you got, buster.

PC: And the answer is…email, texting, Facebook. Need I go on?

MC: But they are not nearly as personal as a well-placed phone call.

PC: Aha! But look at it this way. Remember my old friend Harley?

MC: Oh, yes. He was quite the motormouth. Harley… I forget his last name.

PC: It’ll come to me too. Hopefully, while I’m still breathing. But precisely. He would start running his mouth and the call was all over – except it wasn’t. I didn’t have the heart to hang up on him.

MC: So you sat there stone-faced and listened.

PC: Well, not stone faced exactly. I mean it wasn’t like he was getting in my grille, being that he was on the phone.

MC: So you could make funny faces at him while he kept his engine running.

PC: Oh, yes. Jabbering away about this or that or what-have-you.

MC: And your point is….

PC: …that Harley on the phone would control the conversation.

MC: Because you let him.

PC: Well, I can be Mr. Nice Guy when the mood strikes, Mom.

MC: Yes, you can, Pop. And, by the by, what’s that synonym for “Nice” you sometimes like to use?

PC: Uh, “Sucker”?

MC: Bingo!

PC: Oh, so it’s pop off on Pop day?

MC: Who, little ol’ me?

PC: If I may continue my lesson… when you text or email or post on that Facebook thing-a-majingy, YOU control the conversation, because it’s not in real time. It’s in your time.

MC: Besides, even I have to say that talking on the phone can be draining, takes a lot out of you when it goes on and on.

PC: Yes, it’s what the corporate types might call time mismanagement.

MC: I am beginning to get it. You pick up the phone and you risk losing control of your clock. You type a message and you are done with it, like clockwork.

PC: I gotta hand it to you, Mom. You definitely have mastered the minute details of our human communications circa 2012.

MC: Not only that. I just remembered motormouth Harley’s last name.

PC: Sock it to me, Baby!

MC: Davidson.