Lost in Translation
A Thanksgiving meditation on the generation gap.
by Kevin Keck
November 26, 2008
I always like to read W.H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939" in class on September 11th. It's a poem that is strangely prophetic and hopeful. I always start class by asking the students to remember where they were on that day in 2001, and this year, for the first time ever, I realized I was standing in front of a room full of people who had no memory of being anywhere. They were seven or eight at the time. If 2001 is a vague and distant remembrance for them, then my high school graduation in 1991 is ancient history.
They also do not speak my language. I have lost track of the number of papers I have had to decipher this term because a good portion of them used texting shorthand. It takes me nearly twenty minutes to send a text message that is but a single sentence. One of my students declared proudly in class that she had cut back on texting the previous month, sending only 20,000 text messages.
"You mean two thousand," I said.
"No, twenty thousand. You know, two-zero-zero–" her phone beeped and she looked down to check it, then back up at me briefly as her thumb began to twitch over the buttons, "–zero-zero."
"You know, a phone call is more efficient, Darien."
She blew a puff of air between her lips and said, "Why would I talk to people I don't like?"
I let the conversation end there. I can't imagine sending 20,000 text messages to people I adore, let alone tapping out what amounts to simplified Morse Code to people I can't bother to talk to on the phone.
What kind of strange creatures will my children become?
And if these teenagers seem so inscrutable to me now, what kind of strange creatures will my children become? With my own parents, I may have had total communication failure when it came to matters of audio quality, or how to dress (my mother was forever ironing my jeans so that they possessed a crease that could slice a tomato), or how much one should spend on a prom date (my dad still grumbles that I dropped $50 on dinner my junior year), but at least we were a part of the same world. The great technological leaps between the generations of my grandfather, my father, and me amount to color television, the 8-track, and the microwave.
I am accepting of the fact that the coming twenty years of communicating with my children will usually be punctuated with much eye-rolling — on their part and mine. After all, it was my generation that honed sarcasm to a fine skill. But I am haunted with the constant worry that by the time they reach the age where we can finally start talking like reasonable people, it will be too late. And I don't mean too late in the cat's-in-the-cradle-Harry-Chapin way.
©2008 Kevin Keck and Babble
About the Author
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Kevin Keck is the author of the memoir Are You There God? It's Me. Kevin., and a collection of personal essays, Oedipus Wrecked. Visit him at www.thekeck.com.
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