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My Dearies:

I miss car keys. Those unattractive fob blobs they use now don’t hang well on my key chain, and my gentleman friend is always forgetting to give them to the valet. What, you think Old Lady Jackson doesn’t have the occasional suitor to escort her to a nice sushi dinner once in a while?

Please, please, sit down. No, not there, dear, that’s for company. Have a cookie, you’re too thin. Is it cold in here? What was that? Speak up, dear. I won’t keep you long, I know you’re busy. Let me tell you a story. One day, that horrible Marion from next door “invited” me to one of those group online thingies where we keep track of our steps and see who has the most—you know those? You do. Of course you do. Well, for a few weeks, I participated, and I thought it was the most wonderful thing. Such a sense of accomplishment at day’s end! So I started counting absolutely everything, and got all these wonderful apps: I counted not just how many steps I took, but also how many hours I slept, how many calories I ate, how many followers I had on Facebook, what the weather was like in Hawaii, how my retirement stocks were doing. I got a countdown app to remind me how many days I had left to shop for my nephew’s birthday. I got an app to track the constellations in the sky, an app to record how much money I spend at Starbucks, an app to remind me to water my plants, another that reminds me when to order more contact lenses, and one that tells me how many times I’ve listened to Doris Day sing “Que Sera Sera” this week. Isn’t progress wonderful? I got an app to read what everyone thinks of restaurants too. This one was confusing to me, because it seems every single restaurant in the country is just horrible. But anyway, I especially loved the steps app because I could look at the thingie marker, and if Marion was getting ahead of me, it would make me jump out of my chair and wave my arms around to get my count higher. I beat her so many days that I could almost forget all the times she hid my trash bins and stole my Sunday paper. Bliss.

Then my gentleman friend and I were home one night drinking prune juice with vodka and binge-watching The Waltons, and apparently I was getting up to check my phone more times than you can say “Good night, Jim-Bob.” Finally my gentleman friend paused the VHS tape right on John-Boy’s face and asked me what it was that was distracting me. And I told him it wasn’t at all that I was distracted; I was just excited by all the wonderful new information that was coming in, and did he want to see the weather in Hawaii or join our step club too? No, he said, he didn’t. And then he asked me a question. “Why?” he said. What was I going to do with all this information? Why keep track of so many things? And why did I keep marching around the living room waving my arms over my head? What did it all mean at the end of a day, or the end of a life, for that matter? (When you’re our age you think about these things, dear, but don’t worry yourself about it just now—you’re still younger than you think.)

Anyway, everything suddenly went topsy-turvy and I had to sit back down on the davenport. Have another cookie while they’re warm, won’t you? My story is almost over. I had to sit down, because I suddenly realized what a waste of time it all was. I take my walk every morning rain or shine—who cares if Marion goes a little farther? I water my plants when the soil looks dry, and I haven’t forgotten my nephew’s birthday once ever. In fact, I started to think about my nephew and all the time he uses that phone, always checking for likes on that Instacart. It’s good to be bored in the car, I always tell him. Spend some time with just yourself and your thoughts and nothing to do. How else will you learn who you are?

I’m worried about your posture, dear. I’m concerned that it comes from all the looking down. What with your phone and the Xbox and the taxi TV and that music player you wear on your arm and the headphones that look like donuts on your ears, doesn’t it make life so much smaller? If absolutely everything important is only happening on such a small screen, isn’t that a shame? Especially when the world is so overwhelmingly large and surprising? Are you missing too much? You can’t imagine it now, but you’ll look like me one day, even though you’ll feel just the same as you do now. You’ll catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and think how quickly it’s all gone, and I wonder if all the time you used watching those families whose lives are filmed for the television, and making those cartoons of yourselves with panting dog tongues, and chasing after that terrible Pokémon fellow…well, will it feel like time well spent? “Here lies Ms. Jackson, she took more steps than the other old biddies on her road”—is that the best I can leave behind? Is it all just designed to keep us looking down, or to give us the illusion that we have some sort of control over our chaotic lives?

Will you do me a small favor, dears, and look up? Especially you New Yorkers and Londoners and other city dwellers who cross all those busy streets. How else will you take in the majesty of the buildings that have stood there for hundreds of years? How else will you run into an acquaintance on the street who might turn into a friend or a lover or even just recommend a good restaurant that no one has complained about on that app yet? If you never look out the window of the subway car, how will you see the boats gliding by on the East River, or have an idea that only you could have? Just look up for no reason, just for a moment here and there, or maybe for an entire day once in a while. Let the likes go unchecked and the quality of sleep go unnoticed. Que sera sera, my dears—whatever will be will be, whether we’re tracking it on our GPS devices or not.

Look up! Look up! What you see might surprise you.

Love,