How are young people stayed in touch in old-time Phoenix, and why they still do

As I drift into my senior years, which I've been doing for a very long time now, I naturally find myself surrounded mostly by people my age, you know, old people from about 30 to 100. And something that I've noticed is how many of these people have forgotten what it was like to be young, and scared.

I have two advantages: I definitely remember being young and scared, and all alone, in Phoenix when I was 19. I also became a teacher at age 38, and since my students were my clients that I cared about, I wanted to please them, and most importantly, I wanted to see through their eyes.

Phoenix was a very scary place for me when I was nineteen. And if I could have whipped out my cell phone and sent a text message to Big Dan, my best friend in high school, that would have been wonderful. And if you're wondering what I was afraid of, it was, well, everything. What if my car breaks down? What if I get a flat tire? You may be smiling indulgently and thinking of Triple A (What's that?) or thinking how easy it is to use a jack to change a tire (I'd never done that at age 19!). My list went on and on of things that old people never even think about. I would have LOVED to have had a cell phone, just to keep in touch. As if was, I wrote to Big Dan every week, and enclosed cartoons. I really had nothing to say, that's the point, I just wanted to keep in touch. By the way, Big Dan kept all of them, and sometime in our forties he mailed me a big package. I still have them.

A typical rant of an old person is seeing a young person walking along staring at their phone. From the moment they can, these young people immediately check their phone for texts. For old people who don't understand, they wonder if they think these kids are doctors checking for an emergency or something? Or the old people say that the young 'uns should put away their phone and look around them at the big beautiful world. The old people see nothing frightening, but the young people see a lot of frightening things like "is that a leering look from a dirty old man over there?" or "Will I get a parking ticket for parking here?", and the list goes on and on. And they turn to their friends for comfort.

Staying in touch is something that I call "monkey chatter", which I learned about from watching a documentary about baboons. While the group were out feeding, they kept up an endless chatter, which simply said, "I am here! Where are you?" with the answer being "I am here! Where are you?" I immediately fell in love with this idea, and I've embraced it for years. Life has often overwhelmed me, even when I thought I knew everything, and could do it on my own, and I do monkey chatter with my friends every day. 

I am here! Where are you?

Image at the top of this post: A drawing that I sent to Big Dan of my apartment in Phoenix in 1978. I didn't have a cell phone, and I didn't have a camera. I wish I had!

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