Coonridge Digest: Trapped in the info highway

Greetings from the Ridge.
She looked like a Norman Rockwell painting – a sweet, elderly lady sitting on the high-backed benches at the Amtrak station, purse in her lap and the wrinkles in the corners of her aged eyes anticipating the train’s arrival.
Herb and I had driven to the station to pick up a friend coming in from Chicago and the size of the crowd waiting in the station heralded the beginning of spring break for the universities. Mothers, dads, kids, and a wild assortment of friends waited for the announcement that the Texas Eagle with express service from Chicago to San Antonio was approaching Kansas City.
But the older lady sat there – not quite lonely but alone.
When you live in a small town like I do, you know everything about everybody so it’s natural when I hit large crowds of people that I begin wondering about the life stories of everyone I meet. I made several attempts to guess just what her situation might be. A granddaughter coming in from Northwestern? An old friend riding down from Bloomington for a visit? Perhaps a young man who’d come to see his aunt for the weekend?
Okay, I confess. My curiosity finally bent me forward enough to ask, “Waiting for someone?”
She smiled and said, “Oh yes. I can’t wait.”
Now that is one totally unsatisfactory answer for a busybody like me, but the smile on her face gently nudged me back onto my bench. It was enough to simply see her joy of expectancy.
Further conversation would have been difficult without my actually getting up and sitting beside her. Everyone over the age of five was talking on a cell phone in the station that evening and the din was almost beyond my tolerance.
The minute you buy a cell phone you immediately assume that the rest of the world is hearing-impaired and you learn to shout the most intimate details of your schedule, your handicaps, your hygiene and your grocery list into the receiver. In the half hour we waited in the station I discovered that the girl behind me, “Wouldn’t try that again with him!”, that the man beside me wasn’t going to catch his plane in St. Louis, and the gal two seats over had spit up something that she couldn’t identify during last night’s party. I was trapped in an electronic confessional booth. 
And most of these obnoxiously high-volume chit-chats seemed to be with people who were about to arrive at the station any minute!
Instead of clapping their confounded phones shut and simply waiting a few moments, they were busily draining the Amtrak riders of every last bit of information before they arrived.
But not Lydia. (I had now given her a name.) Lydia sat there with something that no one else in the station still had available… the joy of expectation. The thrill of surprise. The euphoria of simply not knowing something and having to wait for it. She had no cell phone and by looking at her in her navy blue suit, old-fashioned pumps, and netted hat, I guessed that she probably didn’t have one in her car either. She’d opted instead for a lifetime of learning patience, of anticipating life, of being blissfully out of touch.
We’d stopped on the way to the station to pick up a few groceries, and we careened our cart through the supermarket behind a man whose wife was leading him aisle-by-aisle through the grocery store. Instead of making a shopping list she showed him to be the idiot he was by talking him down each aisle as he’d pepper her with such pithy inquiries as “Is it in a red box?” The cell phone had drained his memory.
The I-want-it-and-I-want-it-now-damn-it philosophy has taken substance in our cell phone addiction while this generation and those that follow will never again know Lydia’s joy of expectation. The Information Age has cursed us with the I’ll-die-if-don’t-know mentality. Of course most of this information that we yearn for so desperately is completely trivial or could be had by other means – like talking face to face or simply remembering. Instead we unplug the memory glands of our cerebellum and plug in the cell phone.
The train arrived. As we all shuffled out to the platform I noticed that two parties were still talking to each other on their cell phones as they waved at each other at the train steps. Lots of hugging, lots of hand-shakes, but no real ecstasy since they’d been talking together for the last half hour.
I looked around for Lydia. I was desperate to know how this little drama would play out, but I’d lost her in the rush of travelers. 
However, I knew that somewhere on the far sidewalk her ability to patiently wait was being rewarded with more joy than any of the phone heads would ever know again.
You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.