I received an email recently from my friend Curtis inviting me to be his friend on Facebook. I was suspicious.
You see, we are both closer to the Social Security retirement age than we are to the legal drinking age. And though we are both computer and internet savvy, you wouldn’t normally associate us with something like Facebook. I wondered if this email was really from him. I have watched enough television news to know that you have to be wary of sexual predators on the internet. What if the email was from a 12 year-old girl pretending to be Curtis? Or what if the email was from a guy in Nigeria who wanted to steal my identity? Maybe if I clicked on the link he would steal my credit card numbers and my entire 401(k) account.
I decided to call Curtis, just to be safe. He confirmed to me that he had just joined Facebook and had invited me to be his friend, though he wasn’t sure yet what that meant. I opened his email and clicked on the link. A mere 2 ½ hours later I finished signing up as his friend. That was 3 weeks ago. We haven’t spoken since. I am not sure what is supposed to happen next. Will he send me a message to go look at his Facebook page? Or am I supposed to go there periodically to see if he has a message for me? I was going to call him about something but I was afraid he might be mad at me for not ever checking Facebook.
Then I had a brilliant idea - I would send him a text message! That way I could communicate with him without risking actually talking to him. I could just pretend he wasn’t angry with me. I decided to tell him in my text that my internet wasn’t working in case he was wondering why I hadn’t been to his Facebook page. Now I just needed to learn how to send a text message.
A few days ago I asked my niece Marissa to teach me. She can text 416 words per minute and has calluses on her thumbs. Yesterday I decided to send her a test text message, but I couldn’t find my cell phone. I don’t use it much. Last month my usage was 3 minutes. I only received two phone calls, both of them wrong numbers. I tried calling my cell phone, hoping I would hear it ring, but of course it’s battery was dead. Eventually I found it. It took me only 20 minutes to type the following message:
HI MARISsa how are lol you unCle daVID
I sent the text, then called Marissa to see if she had received it. She is 15, so naturally she had her cell phone with her and turned on. Yes, she said, she got my message. I quickly ended the phone call because it felt like cheating to actually talk out loud. I didn’t even find out how she was LOL.
I started to compose my message to Curtis when I realized I didn’t have his cell phone number! Maybe I could write him a letter instead. Unfortunately we don’t have stationery and writing on computer paper seemed impersonal. I checked in our folder where we keep greeting cards for a variety of occasions. I found two birthday cards, three thank you notes and an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party. None of them seemed appropriate. We also had some blank cards but they all had girly flowers on the front. So I won’t be sending him anything in the mail.
I am stumped as to my next step. Curtis, if you are reading this and aren’t too mad at me, instead of being friends on Facebook, can we be friends in real life?

David LeSueur lives in Littleton. If you would like to be his friend, please call him. No text messages accepted.