Personal note: my wife attends an event at our niece’s house presumably about clothes or jewelry. Meanwhile, I sit in a McDonald’s restaurant, looking at dead flies on window sills and listening to an old man tell his family, “I am NOT moving back to Alabama. You cannot have my car. These are my keys.” while he charges his cell phone that he hooked up to a power receptacle hidden high above an insect zapper he unplugged.

What is the definition of crazy?

Is it the kid using a metal stake to compress the garbage so he doesn’t have to empty the rubbish bin for a while, his McDonald’s uniform askew, his tie hanging loose?

Is it the woman leaning against the wall outside one of the entrances, smoking a cigarette and chatting on her mobile phone in the afternoon August heat?

What about the people speeding by on the highway?

Or me, drinking an iced coffee after eating a dipcone (soft serve ice cream served in a cake cone and dipped into chocolate)?

What about the way Ballmer ran Microsoft into oblivion? Or the way Bill Gates is trying to make up for years of predatory business practices by attaching his name to the reinvention of the toilet?

I could be making notes about comets or Martian rovers.

I could make a list of people to thank.

Instead, I type on a mobile Bluetooth keyboard for iPad, reinventing myself, reiterating the importance of computer connectedness and listening to a family discuss a boy’s future school performance because his father (grandfather?) has issues about moving back to Alabama to care for his wife (daughter?) and [grand]child.

Nearby, the Tillman D. Hill Public Library.

Closer, a live housefly on the tabletop looking for food.

Across the way, a computer for people to request a job at McDonald’s: “Apply Here / Aplique Aqui — This Employer Participates in E-Verify”.

And I have 45 more minutes to entertain myself until I drive back to my niece’s house to pick up my wife.

These are the salad days, the good ol’ days, the golden years, the midlife crisis years…watching a young family load their kids in the Chevy Silverado truck after having loads of fun in Playland, the father wearing a set of girl’s necklace beads because his little baby is about to fall asleep in his arms, the mother loading the other daughter in the backseat.

We live and then we die.

She drives the truck. He drives the Pontiac Trans Am.

One of their children does not look like it belongs to them but they seem to love each other.

An older couple, he wearing an “Anderson’s Dozer Works” blue work shirt, she using a cane, hobble to their Buick Roadmaster in the handicapped spot.

The days of our lives tucked in between birth and death, not far from the border between Tennessee and Alabama, longtime college football rivals.

What more can we ask for? What more do we want, able to drive and talk on the mobile phone at the same time, arguing in one moment and laughing together in the next?

“I’ll put your face all over facebook, MySpace, Google, the whole Web, if that’ll make you feel better!” The old man laughs and his family joins him. “Of course, I don’t have Internet at home.” They laugh some more. “I’ll sue everybody that makes fun of you who could have seen you if I had Internet at home.” They continue laughing, one of them saying, “Well, you’re on the Internet now. Quick! Send someone an email!” They giggle. He guffaws, “I swear, I’m gonna put it on facebook!” The boy states, “They’re gonna call me names,” and storms off to the bathroom. The man: “I’m gonna pull it up on Yahoo!” The woman snickers. “New email!” he declares as she stands up to look. “See!” She leans over and breaks into a broad grin. “See, I’ve posted pictures of last Thanksgiving. What’s there to make fun of?” The boy returns and rolls his eyes: “That!!! You can’t put those on there!” nodding at me as he leaves the restaurant to get in his Lincoln LS sedan and roll down the windows, playing country music loud enough for me to hear.

They calm down. No more arguments about returning to Alabama. A family makes up in a fast food restaurant, at least for the moment.

The man raises his voice, over the protest of the woman questioning what he’s posting next. “By God I do, NOW!!!” She gets ready to go. “See, you can put all sorts of stuff on facebook. Look what he’s put up there on his own. Birthday party. You’ve got to pay attention to what he puts on there. Maybe you should. Maybe you should. Security issues start with facebook and go from there. Anyone can see where you’re going and where you’ve been. See, here’s stuff from when he was 12. Now everybody can see pictures of everybody. Somebody could come in, slap him across the face and another kid take a picture from across the parking lot, posting it for the world to see. What will they think of that?”

She shakes her head. “They won’t do that. I’ll be back.” She walks out to the Lincoln, lights up a cigarette and drives off with the boy, leaving the man to work on his laptop and talk on the cell phone.

Time for me to leave, a little early to pick up my wife, but well within the range of conversation of an adult man and adult woman having a little fun with a teenage boy about pictures of his offline life in perpetuity on the Internet, while learning from each other what’s important in the boy’s online life.