I have a cell phone. I�ve had it for less than a year. For the longest time, I resisted getting a cell phone. I didn�t want to be one of those people who considered themselves so important that they could not possibly be out of contact, not even during a religious service. Then I got stuck on the highway south of Green Bay with a broken water pump. Although I was able to limp off an exit and call for help, Mr. Philately decided that, henceforth, I should become a person with a cell phone.

I still get very few calls on it. A few are wrong numbers. Most of rest of the calls are from Day-Hay and most of those are to tell me that she has stopped at Best Friend�s house on her way home from school. Most of the time, I�m at home by that point but occasionally I am on the road while picking Kat up from some place. It doesn�t really matter. Day-Hay loves gadgets because she is a technological child of her time�or maybe she just bonded to the incubator in which she spent the early hours of her life.

I don�t even make that many calls on it. It is handy to be able to call home easily when I have stopped for a quick grocery pick-up on my way home from work and have forgotten to bring the list with me. A quick call has been known to save me from going out for milk just minutes after arriving home with other groceries.

Yet I don�t regret getting it. I have discovered the freedom it gives me just through the possibility that someone could call it. Mr. Philately and I can head out to one restaurant together, change our minds, and then go to another without taking time to stop at a pay phone and give the kids the new number. It allows me to go out and run errands when waiting for someone, usually Kat, to call to say that she needs to be picked up after some event.

I thought it would be pretentious and maybe it is but it�s also freedom�and I�m in favor of that.

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