Grandma Learns to Text

Dorothy is seventy-eight years old and lives alone in a small yellow house in Columbus, Ohio. Last Christmas, her son gave her a smartphone. "Now you can text the grandkids, Mom," he said. Dorothy smiled and said thank you, but secretly she was terrified of the thing.

For the last six weeks, she has been trying to send messages to her family, and the results have been interesting. On Monday, she wanted to tell her grandson Josh "Good luck on your exam." Instead, she sent the whole family group a photo of her kitchen ceiling and three crying faces. On Wednesday, she wrote "I love you" to her daughter, but the phone changed it to "I love yogurt."

Her emojis have been causing the most confusion. Dorothy has been using a little picture of a skull because she thinks it is a friendly smiling ghost. She has sent it to her doctor, to her pastor and to her neighbor, who had just come home from the hospital. "Mom, please stop sending skulls," her son wrote. Dorothy didn't understand why everybody had been laughing so much.

Finally, her granddaughter Kayla, who is sixteen, offered to help. Every Thursday after school, she has been coming to Dorothy's house with a bag of cookies and a lot of patience. They sit at the kitchen table, and Kayla explains everything slowly. "This is the app for messages, Grandma. This is the keyboard. If you hold the button with the microphone, you can talk instead of typing."

Dorothy has been taking notes in a little notebook: how to charge the battery, how to turn up the volume, how to take a photo without her thumb in it. Some things are still difficult. Autocorrect has been driving her crazy, and she has accidentally called Kayla three times while the phone was in her pocket. But she has been getting better every week.

Last night, something wonderful happened. Josh, who studies in California, sent a message to the family group: "I passed my exam!" Before anybody else could answer, Dorothy wrote: "Congratulations, sweetheart! I'm so proud of you." And then she added one emoji, the right one this time: a small red heart.

Five minutes later, her phone buzzed. It was a video call from Josh. "Grandma, you've been practicing!" he said, laughing. Dorothy held the phone up so he could see her face, not the ceiling. "Yes, I have," she said proudly. "And next week, Kayla is going to teach me how to send voice messages. Then you'll never get rid of me."