Can you Google your way through an American Ninja Warrior Course?

 P is for Prosciutto

We gather as a family after church every Sunday for lunch.  I always look forward to the recaps from the week, the inside jabs, and the candor of conversations as everyone filters into the kitchen.  This past Sunday as Angel and his boys came in he pointed across the table at a meat tray and said, “Eli, that’s Prosciutto.”  Most of us stopped what we were doing and waited for the explanation of this rather random declaration.  Angel explained that on the way to church they were playing a game by going through the alphabet naming a food that starts with each letter. A is for apple, B is for bread, P is for prosciutto. 

The conversation opened my memory like a time capsule to the games we played as we rumbled the national and state highways in the 1970’s.  Remember Slug Bug, a fun little bruise producing game?  We played I Spy, and many games that involved billboards and license plates and cows and graveyards and railroad tracks.  It’s amazing what we did to entertain ourselves prior to having personal handheld reach to the world wide web.  Sometimes we had to have conversations or sing songs uphill both ways in the snow. 

You have likely told someone in the last thirty days to put the phone down for a second, screen time is over, or be present only to find yourself jumping from Facebook to Google to Amazon to Zillow like an American Ninja Warrior.  I cannot be the only one on both sides for this problem.   I am the problem and I am the solution.  Somedays I am the villain and other days I am the victim.  We have outsmarted our own culture.  

The worst is in the car.  We should be playing silly word games and counting cows.  I am not making light of the dangers of texting and driving, but googling in the passenger seat comes at a cost too.  I pick up the phone to Google one little random thought or piece of nonsense, and then realize I have left the car entirely.  In a matter of miles, I have clicked from “chartering a jet to Hawaii” to “home of the sod poodles”. See picture below.   We are plugged into the trivia, knowledge and pseudo wisdom of this world and beyond but disconnected from those buckled in beside us. 

Challenge: look out the window and count cows, drive by my house and slug someone in the biceps, or play food games but remember P is for Pizza.