Friends for tea

Dear friends, Carolyn and Paul, were passing through Portland en route by car from California, where they live, to Seattle, settling her parents' estate and helping to clear out the home where her parents died this past year. We met at my favorite tea place, Steven Smith's, for talk of what our lives are delivering to us now.

Aging, death, birth, finding our rhythm in retirement (mine), partial retirement (Paul's), and full-time work (Carolyn's) in our young-old-age. They have a grandson Bella's age, a granddaughter five months old, and another grandchild on the way. Paul is interested in buying a camera, so we talked also of cameras, technology, and the ways the world has changed since the Internet arrived and people started living with cell phones or iPads in their hands.

There is much to love in all this connectivity, in social networks, in virtual friendships and the information at our fingertips. But all three of us crave time to be unplugged and unreachable--even for emergencies. We sometimes pretend to forget our cell phones. Sometimes we do forget them. Or forget to charge them. We note that for our children, being unplugged is unthinkable. It annoys them for us to be unplugged. This, we think, is the generation gap of our time.

I've turned comments back on, not because this casual snapshot of old friends deserves comment, but because I'm always interested in people's feelings about unpluggability. Who likes it. Who needs it. Who can't even bear to think about it.