A Look On The Lighter Side: A new-fangled hero’s adventure

There’s only one thing that infuriates me more than dealing with new-fangled technology … and that’s when the new-fangled technology doesn’t work!
My husband and I were in a hospital room recently, visiting someone  (spoiler alert: they’re fine now), when I realized that, of all the beeping from machines all around us, none of it was coming from my cell phone.
“My cell phone is dead!” I exclaimed. “And there’s zero service here!”
“You sound upset,” remarked my husband.  “I should think you’d be happy.”
“Yes,” added the friend, “We all know how you hate the things.”
“That’s true, but…”  
My voice trailed off. Could it be that, like kudzu, it had grown on me?
The truth was, my two boys — adults now, or so they tell me — were at that very moment driving down the East Coast to move the older brother into his new apartment.
Without me.
The only reason I had agreed to let them do this was that their grandmother lived near their destination.
Also, they insisted that “Mom, we’ll only be a cell-call away.”
Except now, my cell-phone was useless! There was no way for them to reach me, except by calling our friend’s bedside phone.  But how to tell them the phone number?
“I know! I’ll text them!” I said.   
“No, that won’t work,” said the friend. “Dead cell phone, remember?”
“Okay, I’ll call them.”
“From what?”
“Oh.”  From my dead cell phone. “Well, what if I email them?”
“To two young men in a moving car?” she asked me.  “Do you seriously want to do that?”
“No, of course not.”
“Look at it this way, Judy” said my husband.  “They’re on an adventure.”
“Great.  An ‘adventure’,” I groused.  “That was always the word I used with the kids; it meant:  A Horribly Messed Up Situation that I’m Forcing Myself to Seem Cheerful About!”
“No,” he persisted.  “I mean like the Adventures of Hercules!  For example, remember last night, when we told them ‘Don’t try to drive across Manhattan, no matter what the navigation software tells you?’  What did they answer?”
“They said , ‘But what if it says that’s the shortest route?’ ”
“And Judy, you said, ‘Do not listen to the Siren’s song.  As soon as you’re over the bridge, or through the Midtown Tunnel, the music stops and you will find yourself trapped in river-to-river gridlock.  Happens every time.’”
So instead, my offspring have to navigate the bumper-to-bumper gridlock of Staten Island, stuck between the six-headed Scylla-monster of other peoples’ car wrecks at the side of the road, and the Charybdis whirlpool of new traffic patterns caused by construction.
Aha!  They are emailing me after all!  “They say they’ve reached a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike!”
That would be Hercules’ chore of cleansing the massively filthy stables of King Augeas.  
Hercules did it by diverting a river through the site. I just hope my boys discover the bottles of hand sanitizer I left for each of them, in the car’s side pockets.
“Not to mention the Golden Fleece,” says my husband — “every time they have to pay tolls!”
The thing is, there really is no Greek adventure I can think of that compares with setting out for a new place, and furnishing it to make your home.  
“Look at it this way, Judy.  If we had been able to go along, we would only have gotten in the way.  
This way it’s an adventure, — their adventure — and the excitement of everything is magnified.  Do you remember how it was for us?”
To tell the truth, I remember nothing…and you can’t call suburban Long Island any kind of a frontier.  
But I didn’t say that.  Instead, I took my husband’s hand, smiled, and said, ‘You’ve got a point.”  
And just at that moment, as if a magical spell had been lifted, my phone rang, and it was my boys, telling me they were safe at their destination — having some turkey sandwiches at .Grandma’s.
“So nice to have the technology working again,” I murmured. I even meant it!