They say your life passes before your eyes when you’re on your death bed.
Happily, I wouldn’t know.
But I can tell you one time when that does happen: When you’ve lost your cellphone.
Like just the other day.
I had driven half-way across the county, to a meeting of people I didn’t yet know very well … only to discover, once I got there, that my cellphone was not in my back pocket.
Nor was it in my purse.
My next step was to excuse myself from the meeting (which was embarrassing, since it was my turn next to give a report), and run back to my car.
Surely I had left my phone on the seat!
But no. It wasn’t anywhere.
I wanted to call home, to ask my husband if I had left my phone there…but I didn’t have a phone!
And I discovered long ago that there is no such thing as a phone booth, any more.
Not even Superman can find one when he needs to change into his suit.
So I did the next most logical thing: I began to panic.
My mind started reeling back, back, back — through every place I’d been in the last 24 hours, every place I could have left it.
You know how, when you lose something, people always say, “So when was the last time you had it?”
And you always snap back, “If I knew that, it wouldn’t be lost, now would it?”
But I was all alone this time, so I had to play both parts in my head:
“Face it, Judy — it’s just gone! Gone from your life! You will never see it again!”
“But wait! I can retrace my steps — of course I can! I’ll just check which maps I’ve used recently!”
“Really? How?”
“Or, I know — I’ll just look at the pictures I’ve taken! That’ll show right away where I’ve been!”’
“Uh hunh. You’ll look at the pictures on what?”
“Oh. The phone that’s gone missing” — I started to hyperventilate — “with all the photos from over the years, that my husband keeps nagging me to download.
Or upload. Or over-load. Oh my God, it’s all gone!”
Now the missing pictures started flashing before my eyes.
Every never-to-be-redone photo I had ever taken: the ones of my kids with their grandmothers; the ones proving I hadn’t killed the raspberry bushes yet, to send to my son overseas who doesn’t believe me; the one from the town we’d passed through where the “No Stopping Any Time” sign pointed directly to a Stop sign….
When did I last use it?
Aside from pictures, my mind is a total blank.
Is that the panic talking? Or am I actually losing brain cells through my dependence on things like my cellphone?
Some scientists think that forgetting is a good thing.
Blake Richards and Paul Frankland, of the University of Toronto, do experiments about memory… and they think that forgetting things might actually be the brain’s way of clearing obsolete information out of the way.
Pruning the undergrowth, as it were, to allow for new connections.
But if that’s true, the gardeners in my brain have run amok, pruning things I wasn’t done with yet.
None of which is helping me find my phone.
I made it through the rest of that meeting in a cold sweat, like the sad, silicon-addled junkie that I have become.
All I can think of is getting home, where I pray I left my phone.
But after calling it and looking for it everywhere — still no luck.
“I know you’re going to yell at me, Judy,” says my husband, “but I have to ask you, anyway — when did you use it last? What do you remember?”
And that is the moment when it pops into my head that I had used my phone to navigate to the very meeting I had just come home from!
“But that would mean — it’s probably still in the car! But I tell you, I looked there!”
This time, with my husband calling from the house phone, I finally found it — on the floor, way back under the passenger seat.
That’s why I keep the land-line. And the husband. They help me co-exist with a cellphone!
