‘John Boy!’

‘Yes, Mary Ellen?’

‘Why do we have 26 boxes of duct tape sittin on the front porch, again?’

‘Maaaaaa, dad’s doin’ it, again. He’s ordering stuff online that we don’t need’.

Many of us have been faced with the awkward situation of having to take our parent’s keys away because they drive like they own the road.  Or they wake up at 4 am and decide to drive to Oklahoma for coffee.

As we, ahem..of this age, mature into our more goldener years, we are faced with a new responsibility that our ancestors never had to face; electronic accountability. And thusly, our loved ones are now saddled with the job of being not only our driving skills monitor but also our device monitor.

I knew this sweet little lady that became obsessed with the local Dollar Store as she aged. She had more yellow and black shopping bags in her house than you’d care to imagine. She was still independent driving and she might ‘stop by the Dollar Store’ after church for milk. But I’d see her in that store after church, the happiest smiling little lady you ever did see pushing a buggy full of fake flowers and Little Debbie cakes.

We all loved her dearly. She just loved the Dollar Store more than most people  I mean who doesn’t love a good deal? There are far worse things she could have had an obsession with as she aged so beautifully. Nobody wants to tell their mama to stop buying up all the tequila at the corner liquor store.

Our mom would tell the story of how dad was driving the wrong way UP the bypass one day. They had been to the bread store out south and he went downtown and just turned left right into the oncoming traffic and kept driving.   And the whole time she said he wasn’t worried in the least, even with all her yelling. I’m figuring that his marital survival instinct there just tuned her yelling out.  She said that just kept driving his red Ford pickup and waving at the people waving at him and ‘eating them damn snacks’ that he’d just bought.

She told the cardiologist later that her heart was strong. She knew because she met several 18-wheelers face to face that day.

So see, we can be completely oblivious to the extent of our circumstances and not even be aware that we’ve just posted an exciting Tic Toc of the enormous mole shaped like a cat that we had found on our backside in the shower that morning. And since everyone was gone from the house, we needed advice on this situation. And we wondered if anyone else out there in the entire whole dad-blamed world had a gigantic mole shaped like a cat on their hiney and reckon that it was a melanoma?

So from here on out, we gotta watch our Ps and Qs online, my wonderfully aging friends.

Because we don’t ever want to hear a loud knock on the bathroom door while we’re sitting down. And our grown grandchildren are outside yelling loudly because we can’t hear well anymore,

‘Tawataw!! HEY! Turn off your Facebook live!’.

That’s the best that I can tell about it,

~Mark