Today Pam and I went to Indy. Took Pam’s sister, Jodie, and her two sons to the airport. They took a 2:00 Northwest flight to Los Angeles, where Pam’s Mom lives.

During the first part of the ride to Indy, Austin, a high school freshman, was bummed out. He left his cell phone at the house. If I left on a long trip and left my cell phone, I would be bummed out, but I would also be confident of my ultimate survival.

Austin is of a different generation, for whom a cell phone is an appendage. You no more leave the house without your cell phone than you leave without your left arm. It’s how they stay connected with the world…and now he would not be connected. I use the internet for information. Austin’s generation uses it for relationships–chatting, texting, calling. And cell phones are the thing you have with you all the time. And now he would be without it for a week. He would be unplugged. Incommunicado.

Austin will survive. But he doesn’t realize it.

After dropping them off, Pam and I ate at Skyline Chili (we don’t have one in Fort Wayne), then went to a wonderful used bookstore, where I found three Robert Parkers that I don’t have, a James Ellroy, a James Patterson, and some other author new to me. Pam found some religious novels.

If heaven is contextual, then for Pam and me, heaven is a used bookstore.