Google it: Why do I feel like road kill on the Information Highway?

Sitting isn’t what it used to be.

And we shouldn’t take this sitting down.

I have been in a sit-a-thon this week while visiting at Hilton Head Hospital.

Hospitals, I have learned, not only have pricing from a parallel universe, but that’s also where they get their clocks.

A lot of waiting takes place, let’s put it that way.

So it is that I have discovered that the art of sitting around has devolved into something rather lonely. People sit next to each other, but are isolated in their own worlds, staring at a mobile telephone.

As I grew up, there was a saying, “Come sit a spell.”

Or, “Come take a load off,” one listless storyteller would say to another.

“Won’t you come join me?”

“Pull up a chair.”

“Make yourself at home.”

These were invitations to take a break from the Information Highway, which back then was a two-lane affair meandering through the Main Street of every town and city.

Sitting a spell could have involved shelling butter beans together.

Or the recitation of a family story. Like the time a childless woman looked at the Baby Boomer explosion at Granny’s house and asked, “What good is kids?”

Or the time the preacher asked Granny, “Shall I keep my fork?” And she said, “You can keep it if you want to, but that’s all you’re going to get.”

Someone said her iced tea tasted funny, and she said, “Well, drink it and laugh.”

Over and over and over again the stories were told and people howled as if they’d never heard them before.

That was when people pulled up a chair and actually talked to each other.

They put me in a small room to wait as my wife had a medical procedure. The room’s major features were a soft drink machine and a television. I was alone, so I muted the idiot box, as much as I like soap operas and the presidential campaign, which are now on the same channel labeled “news.”

A security guard popped his head in, stunned that I was not watching television. He felt it necessary to tell me this large flashing object on the wall was there. I said, “Yes, and if you’ll let me borrow your pistol for a second, I’ll put it out of its misery.”

He was not amused.

So I’m flipping through a Southern Living magazine that was celebrating 50 years of Southern Living magazine and see on the food timeline that in the year of our Lord 2007, the 7 billionth can of SPAM was sold.

I’m chewing on that thought, wondering how it is that we are not extinct, when my phone buzzes.

It’s my wife, texting that she is done and they say she is fine. And two minutes later, the same message is on Facebook. And people around the South staring at their telephones are responding with little love symbols that have replaced pulling up a chair and sitting a spell to hear the same old stories.

And so the art of sitting has taken a back seat to the art of knowing.

The text of our family lore will never be the same.

“Shall I keep my fork?”

“Google it.”

This story was originally published May 12, 2016 at 5:05 PM with the headline "Google it: Why do I feel like road kill on the Information Highway?."