"If the cabdriver kills me, goodbye and I love you!"

My wife's final words that fateful day, delivered via an ominous email.

Here...let me run the message by you again...

"If the cabdriver kills me, goodbye and I love you!"

Exclamation point was all hers, too.

What was I to make of this? Had Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver picked her up on a one-way ride to oblivion? 

Immediately I fired back a phone call. Zip. Zilch. Dead zone.

So my wife was dead, slaughtered by a Kamikaze cabdriver on her way home from a medicinal marijuana ("Do they give out samples?" I'd asked her) summit in Denver, Colorado. 

I don't know if my wife is (was?) kidding, if she's alive, if I need to go unpeel her outta a cab in Denver or what.

I mean, what else could I assume?

I really, really hate electronic messaging.
 
It's nearly as bad as my daughter's text to me earlier this year: My mom just had a heart attack, can you watch my dog?

Wait...what? In a panic, I tried calling her back. I texted (and I loathe texting as I'm still on the ol' flip phone, tap, tap, tapping each button painstakingly three times just to get one letter and that's if I don't screw it up). No reply. Once again, I'm abandoned to the dead zone of drama with no recourse but to FREAK OUT.

Phone calls are good, people. Remember them? There's no mistaking a person's tone whether it's screamed in blood-curdling shrieks or spoken with mild amusement. Either way I'd get the message.

Which is just one of the many reasons I still haven't gone Smart Phonesque. I like hearing peoples' voices. I like the lost art of phone calling. And I don't want to end up like those restaurant people who don't communicate with the person they're eating with but instead teppity-tap away on their phones while slurping soup.

Ain't no smart phones in Peculiar County. Lots of other weird stuff, though. Click here to discover.