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2007-08-21 issue:

Communication mulling

Editorial of The Mennonite

by Susan Sommer

Print Article

With some reluctance I added a cell phone to my morning walk. Who wants a cell phone interruption first thing in the morning?



This got me thinking about the pros and cons of communication methods. It’s a joy to receive TMail in my email inbox. TMail is an e-zine of The Mennonite. And it’s free.

E-zine is not listed in my dictionary, but Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, defines it as an online magazine.

I haven’t found a downside for TMail, which is similar though not identical to The Mennonite, but then it doesn’t interrupt me unless I want to be interrupted. A cell phone is something else. So much for quietly contemplating the sunrise.

Not that I have complete solitude on the early morning Illinois prairie. Lucy’s usually there, ear phones in, connected to her music. We greet each other and sometimes comment on the weather. She works in accounting at our local bank.

Then there are the Baers, who have a milk cow and some breeder calves. A whole string of Baer family farmsteads are in the area, and my walk takes me by two of them. The Baer boys have the first field planted in the spring and the first one harvested in the fall—first corn up, first corn in.

They’ll be the Baer Boys forever, though they have their own crop of boys. Maybe they’ll even be Old Ben Baer’s Boys forever. Maybe not. I don’t hear my children referring to Old Ben, though I don’t have to tell them who he was.

The Baers probably have cell phones. Cell phones are useful for cooperative farming, and these conservative German Baptists are not opposed to useful machinery.

The Baers always wave, and on occasion they’ll greet me. Their sister Nancy and I became friends when her Custom Sewing shop was next door to my Tremont News and Printing.
On one early morning walk, I took a photo of the rising sun silhouetting a Baer farmstead. A few weeks later, when their teenaged son was killed in a tractor accident, I used the sunrise photo to make a sympathy card. Nancy phoned me, likely on her cell phone, with her appreciation.

Emailing the sympathy and photo would not have relayed the same message.

Last week I walked behind a woman whose slow progress across the parking lot, left hand to the ear and right hand gesturing were pretty good clues she was on her cell phone. While talking, she managed to exit and lock her vehicle, sling her purse over her shoulder, enter the store, grab a grocery cart, grab a courtesy cart sanitizer, wipe the cart handle and proceed to the produce—all without moving the phone from her ear. Clearly she was more interested in the phone conversation than in putting sweet corn into her shopping cart.

I headed for the baked goods, though not before giving her a meaningful glare, which was lost on her, since she gazed into midair, still gesturing. She was still talking in the checkout lane.
Spaced-out grocery shopping. Tuned in to her conversation but tuned out to the rest of us. Irritating.

Talk about irritating, our youngest child replies best to text messaging. Phone him at home, he doesn’t answer. Leave a message, he doesn’t reply. Call his cell phone, he doesn’t pick up.
But send a text message, and I have a reply.

I had to explain text messaging to my inlaws. They saw no need for another complication.
“Why?”

“It’s quicker. You can tell a TM because the ring is different. It’s great when Jim’s in a meeting and has his phone on vibrate. I used it at San José. Jim was center front at Table Six, while I was on the periphery at Table 80. ‘Meet me at the drinking fountain.’ ”
“Couldn’t you just arrange that ahead of time?”

“Yes, but text messaging can be useful.” I didn’t tell her about Jim’s cell phone ringing during the delegate session; it was probably this that drew the moderator’s gentle reprimand. It wasn’t my TM that set it ringing, though.

Still mulling communication’s intricacies during my early morning walk, I remembered my son’s birthday. So right then and there, between the Baers’ cornfield on the north and their bean field on the south, I TM’d him a birthday greeting.

When I got no response, I asked him about it.

 “Mom, it was 6 a.m.”

Susan Sommer is chair of the board of The Mennonite, Inc.

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