Your Password, Please

Everywhere I read they are writing about Pokemon.  What is Pokemon?  Our nation's political figures are all sending out messages on Twitter.  What is Twitter?  I never signed up for Facebook, which I gather is a big thing.  All my grandchildren, well, everybody, really are on Facebook, and this, according to my son, is why there is complete silence from all of them. They assume I am "following them on Facebook."  There's a site for sending everyone photos.  I was with one of my sons the other night when his son sent an image of the young man and his wife all dressed up and out on the town at a concert.  What fun to know that your progeny can get dressed up of a Saturday night, hire a baby sitter, and take in the theater.  I am completely out of it.  There are several other entries to communication I haven't even mentioned names like Snapchat and Instagram because I don't know their names, but sometimes catch a syllable or two when overhearing conversations at lunch or dinner. The bigger social problem for me is that I have the most horrible memories of evenings at the house of friends when they brought our their slides of photo albums of recent trips, a distant friend's wedding. These new sites,  I might as well be deaf and dumb, sitting in the corner.  Don't mind grandpa, he's harmless.  It's much the same with the television.  I just cannot master those various sticks with all the buttons, the open sesame to all the images in that big screen sitting in our living room. The times my husband has gone out of town and left me elaborate handwritten instructions I have almost immediately summoned up nothing but snow. Well, at least, as my husband observes condescendingly "you handle the new IPhone very well."  Hey, I have had a Mac product since 1984, written books and articles with it.  I am not dummy. But I do see the slippage.  The other day when trying to open up the message site to send a text off to my granddaughter, my efforts were blocked by a bar appearing on the screen which said something like Googlechat or something like that demanding that I enter a password.  Well, that's the end of texting, at least on the computer, I murmured.  But somehow it has never reappeared, but I will not be lulled into false security.  I realize that this is the way my world will end not with a bang or a whimper but with my inability to come up with a password for my every action.  Texting today, farting tomorrow. You just wait!