Nana is dialed in and I'm still on hold

Cell phone. Palm Pilot. Blogging. Bluetooth. iPod. Macbook. Facebook. And soon, the iPhone. What do these things have in common? My mom, a grandmother 13 times over, was into all of it way before I was. You know you’ve missed the train to hip-town when your own mother is sporting a shuffle while you are still walk-manning around in a late 80s trance.

Many moonwalks ago, when the Palm Pilot was all the rage, I worked for a technology consulting company and juggled a demanding schedule. Yet I clung to my dino-Daytimer to manage my work across multiple time zones while my mom categorized recipes and wrote “to do” lists in her new Palm. She was the savvy early adopter, and I was the lazy late bloomer. But in my defense, I was only late because I didn’t have a Palm with an alarm chime going off automatically to remind me that it was time for me to upgrade to the tools of the 21st century.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone, especially me, when this past week, one of my friends from middle school found me on Facebook through, you guessed it, my Mom’s “wall”. (This, I believe, makes me officially as uncool as a smokin’ CPU in a commodor 64. And not the good kind of smokin’).

You see, a couple days prior I had reluctantly set up a quick profile on Facebook so I could log in and see updates from my brother on his big move to DC. I had resisted any participation in this online venue up until this point, because (and here’s the irony) I thought myself TOO OLD to toggle with the likes of teenagers, too crotchety to connect with college kids.

But apparently Facebook is for moms too. MY MOM, that is. And wouldn’t ya know, she has like five hundred friends already, and stuff written all over her wall. And I’ll be honest, I really don’t even know what that means. I didn’t think walls were supposed to be written on. At least that what my Mom told me back when I was five and quite prolific with crayons. Boy, has she changed her iTune since then!