There are certain things I just don’t want to know.
I don’t want to know what is really in my hot dog (truly, I don’t: please stop sending me those links on Facebook). And I don’t want to know that being in congress increases your chances of being a millionaire by about a thousand percent. (Okay: I do want to know that, but I don’t, you know?) And, believe it or not, I don’t even want to know where my toothbrush has been when it goes missing for the day. (This is not as odd as it might sound—both of my children are not only peripatetic brushers, but they are also opportunistic ones, appropriating the nearest toothbrush when necessary and then casting it aside when they are through. In the future, if you are using my bathroom and happen to notice that all of the toothbrushes are on little chains—like in the bank—you’ll know why.)
There is one thing, however, that I will always want to know, no matter what, and that is where my children are.
With my son Clyde, it’s easy: I just follow the sounds of dying zombies and exploding tanks and, sure enough, there’s Clyde, on the the other end of the gun (or cricket bat, or chainsaw, or flamethrower—whatever the weapon du jour happens to be). Which is another way of saying “on the other end of the PS3 controller.”
Clementine, however, is a little more difficult. She actually goes outside. (To be fair, Clyde will also go outside—at least as far as the signal on his bluetooth will reach.) Clementine, though, not only goes outside, but goes out of the yard, which makes her a wee bit harder to track down (there are also hardly ever any screaming zombies in her vicinity). It was for this reason that I got her a cellphone—to locate her.
No matter what your thoughts on teens and cellphones are, there is no denying that they are great devices for locating your missing child. Or, at least, they should be. The problem is, however, that for cellphones to function as a locator device two important conditions must be met. (I’m ignoring the GPS feature some cellphones have, because those plans cost money, and I’m already paying enough for the phone.) Anyway, the first condition is that the child actually answers the phone when they see who’s calling (thanks for nothing, caller ID), and the other is that the phone actually be in their possession in the first place.
You’d think that the second part would be the easiest—after all, isn’t the usual stereotype of a modern teenage girl that of one with a cellphone absolutely welded to her palm? And even putting aside stereotypes for the moment, wasn’t this the same child who absolutely begged for a phone of her own? Unfortunately, however, just like the Barbie Dream House you begged for when you were ten, the bloom came off the cell phone rose early on, and as often as not when I call it to try and locate its owner I can hear it chirping plaintively from somewhere near the bottom of her unmade bed.
That’s why I went to Plan B: get everyone’s else’s number. That’s right: I have everyone’s number in my own cellphone. Well, okay. Not everyone’s. But everyone I think Clementine might come into contact with, including the people I rather wish she wouldn’t. And better yet, I’m not afraid to use those numbers.
Even better still, the people at the other end of those numbers are not yet immune to my nagging—unlike Clementine—and will therefore generally do whatever it takes to get me to stop calling them. Including walking over to Clementine, tapping her on the shoulder, and saying, “Dude, answer your phone, already; your mom’s driving me crazy.”
Ah, the wonders of modern technology.