My 70-Year-Old Mom Texts Better than Miley Cyrus

Last week, I suffered a minor household tragedy. I slammed my thumb in a sliding-glass door, causing intense, lingering pain, but worse, temporarily disabling my primary means of communication. I could no longer text message.

The real tragedy, however, was that I couldn’t text with my mom.

My mother, who will be 70 next year, just got a BlackBerry. There are certain types of new, gadgety technology she has trouble with—she’s not so hot at getting pictures and videos onto Facebook, for instance—but if it involves typed discourse of any sort, she’s a whiz.

Texting is an ideal solution to a longstanding glitch in our relationship. Phone conversations with my mother can be rambling, nonlinear affairs, crammed with random updates on the lives of people I don’t know, or know vaguely but have lost track of. There are illnesses, deaths, melodramas, all scenically enhanced with tales of gardening and home improvement, punctuated with laments about the weather.

Now, instead of my mother mentioning this person, that person, this person, and me saying, “Who? Who? Who?” we can thumb-type back and forth all day, in concise little info-bytes. Sure, I still call her and talk to her occasionally. But texting opened a whole new vista in our intergenerational dialogue and improved our rapport.

But a few weeks into this new, text-happy phase in our mother-son relationship, I began to notice something about the way my Mom texted. Mom texted like someone who’s been texting for years. Mom texted better than text-addicted teenagers. Miley Cyrus couldn’t text this well.

It started simply enough, with “how r u?” and “hope 2 talk l8tr.” Then “know” became “no.” The swine flu became “sf.” Eventually, the txt-ese was coming fast and furious. Mom was abbreviating everything, sometimes in ways that I had to ponder for a few seconds to figure out. I had a texting-mom-monster on my hands!

And then it dawned on me. Women from my mother’s generation, many of whom had learned shorthand and dictation, were natural texters. My mom had grown up in the 1940s and ’50s as an Army brat, then headed off to a “business college,” and later to work in a Mad Men-era bank in Seattle. In those days, executive secretaries needed some specific skills, exactly the kinds you can watch voluptuous red-haired Joan [2] imperiously exhibiting every week on AMC. My mom could type 100 words a minute, and even more vitally, she was a Gregg shorthand [3] genius.

Invented in the late 19th century and progressively modified over the ensuing decades, Gregg shorthand is one of the great cryptic arts of the Kennedy-era professional female. Secretaries managed executive correspondence in those days, so skillful stenography was essential, as was speedy, accurate typing, in a pre-Xerox era of carbons. I can recall my mother practicing her shorthand in the 1970s and early ’80s, when she decided to go back to office work for a while. It was like watching someone scribbling in Chinese: All those swift, rune-like marks in the actual pages of an actual steno notebook. It was an impressive ability that the adult men in my life, for all their knowledge of blended Scotch, squeeze bunts, land warfare, and the inner logic of the carburetor, couldn’t hope to match.

I should have seen my mom’s texting brilliance coming. Prior to the BlackBerry, there was her experience with e-mail. When she got an account back in the early 2000s, I at first wondered why 1,000-word missives from Mom were showing up in my inbox. But then I did the math, and I unpacked the psychology. She can type 100 words a minute! With terrifying accuracy! One of these things only takes her, like 10 minutes.

Perhaps more importantly, it was also typed communication, one of the pillars of my mother’s education as an adult. I learned how to classify irony and write a lede when I was 19. My mother learned how to type like a machine gunner who hit the bullseye with every shot. Communication by keyboard for her was as soothing, familiar, and probably as exciting as my first dive into Seven Types of Ambiguity [4] or discovering P.J. O’Rourke [5] in Rolling Stone. The size of the keyboard didn’t matter. But, of course, the BlackBerry provides the obvious opportunity to channel Gregg and abbreviate like crazy.

Obviously, there are some implied limits to my mom’s texting repertoire. I haven’t got a “BFF,” “WTF?” or “LOL” yet (although it’s only a matter of time before she discovers LOL and begins to incorporate it freely). Emoticons have been absent. To me, no longer a kid, this is all charming, rather than disturbing. Women of my mother’s generation often married young and were more accepting of traditional societal roles than the Baby Boomer liberators who followed. But they were exposed to a skill-set that, as women moved to higher rungs on the corporate ladder, fell out of vogue. This is certainly progress, but it does mean that women just slightly younger than my mom are, ironically, a bit less comfortable bonding with the keyboard.

But the key to growing old gracefully is never being afraid of giving the new thing a try. And so far, Mom hasn’t backed down from much. Now she’s discovered that there’s something that belongs to the land of the teen that she can do as well as anyone 50 years her junior. And yes, thatz gr8, Mom, and I luv u 4 it.