Adam Gopnik - LOL

 

 

The story I want to tell you tonight is a simple story about myself and my son Luke. Some of you may have read about him over the years. I write about him often enough, and the truth is we've always been pretty good friends, father and son, of course, but we've always shared a lot in common. We lived through Paris together and we love football. I've taught him to love hockey. He even loves the same hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens. And we've always been pretty good friends.

 

But recently he turned 12, and 12 in New York City, because everything is a little more accelerated, 12 is really 13. [audience chuckle] And when 13 happens to kids, as you all know, something profound changes. They begin to become adolescents. They approach being teenagers. And the bond, no matter how strong it is between a father and son or a mother and son or daughter, begins to change and it begins to alter. And suddenly they begin to become more distant from you. And it's like, if I can even use the word in this context, it's sort of like the mortality of parenting. That is to say, you know it's going to happen, but you can't believe it's going to happen to you. [audience chuckle] You think it happens to other people, but it won't happen to me. And of course, you know that it does and that it always will happen.

 

And so, Luke would start coming home about a year ago from school at 3 o’ clock, and I work at home and I write. 3:15, I would open the door and I would do the thing that no parent should ever do, but that no parent can resist. Even though you hear the chorus of parents passed behind you saying, "Don't say that." The doorbell rings and you open it and there's your 12-year-old and you say, "How was your day at school?" [audience laughter] And the 12-year-old hunches his shoulders and droops his head and walks into his room without saying a word.

 

And you know that he's going to do it and you can't help yourself. And the door shuts. Now you know what's going on the other side of that door. He's on his computer. You sort of wish you could smell the healthy whiff of marijuana [audience chuckle] or the sounds of roping because that at least you could connect to from your own adolescence. [audience chuckle] But there's not a chance of that. They're on their computers, they're instant messaging each other six or seven at a time, talking about just what big schmucks their parents are. And that's appropriate. And you still can never learn. The doorbell rings the next day at 3:15, you open it and the Greek chorus of parents’ chants, "Do not ask the question." And like Oedipus, you do the thing you're never supposed to do. You say, "How was your day at school?" And you get a shrug. And he walks into his room and shuts the door. Well, I understood it. And I knew that he was back there in the silence, instant messaging his friends as I said.

 

Now, instant messaging is something that I could not understand. I couldn't understand the appeal of it, and I couldn't understand the prevalence of it. Because the truth is, when I was 12 years old, we used the telephone all the time. We had series of phone conversations with everyone we knew. And it seems to me, and it's always seemed to me that had the telephone message come second and the instant message been the thing that Alexander Graham Bell invented 100 years ago, there'd be no question that the telephone call would be the huge technological breakthrough. If Steve Jobs had invented the phone call, it would be on the front page of The Times tomorrow, and there'd be giant back page ads everywhere you look talking about, "Finally, real voices, real communication. [audience chuckle] Liberate yourself from the pressure of the keyboard. Hear your sweetheart talk." It would be the great breakthrough of the 21st century. 

 

But because that was the 19th century, kids only instant messaged, that's the only way I could understand it. They have six or seven going at the same time. Well, Luke insisted, he's always insisting that I download software, Skype or Limewire. And he insisted that I download AOL instant messaging. And I did, and I had it on my desktop. 

 

One day he comes in, I ask the question, he walks into his room, the door shuts. I go back to my little study and I'm writing, and suddenly I hear a ping on my screen. And I look down and it's an instant message from Luke. [audience chuckle] And it says, "Hey, dad, what’s up?" And I write, "Nothing much, what’s up with you?" [audience laughter] And he says, "Oh, I had a terrible day at school." [audience laughter] And right away, he's 15 feet away from me. We have the conversation that he had denied me at the door five minutes before. [audience chuckle] And I realized, of course, what it was really all about. The appeal of instant messaging is that you control the child, controls the means of communication. You're not accepting the 3:15 third degree, you're claiming the right to control your own conversations. 

 

And so, every day from then on, it became a kind of ritual. It was practically Japanese. So, the doorbell would ring, [audience chuckle] I would open the door, Luke would come in, we would bow at each other. [audience laughter] He would say nothing. He would walk into his room, shut the door. I would go back to my office and shut the door. And about 30 seconds later, a ping would go on. And it would be Luke, "Hey, Dad, what's up with you today?" [audience chuckle] And we would instant message each other and have a conversation about our days. And sometimes we'd actually be sitting on the same bed watching a hockey game together, instant messaging each other [audience chuckle] in total silence.

 

Now, I loved instant messaging once I'd gotten the hang of it. I loved the simplicity of it, I loved the autonomy of it, and I loved the abbreviations, the language of abbreviations that instant messaging has. And Luke taught me all of the abbreviations. BRB means be right back, U2, U2 means you too. GTG means got to go. And then there was one that he didn't even have to teach me because it was so self-evident and, and that was LOL. And I knew right away that it meant lots of love because he put it at the end of every message that he sent me. [audience chuckle] 

 

And even when I sent him a really sententious message, one of those things, "Just do the things you've got to do, and then you'll be able to do the things you want to do. I had homework too." He would always write back, "Okay, Dad. LOL, Luke." [audience laughter] And I was really moved by this because even when I was lecturing him, he was able to absorb it in a mature way and send lots of love back to me as he thought about it. [audience chuckle] 

 

And I thought, this is such a beautiful telegraphic abbreviation for the 21st century because it's like a little arrow of love you can send out to anybody you know. And for the next six months, I was infatuated with instant messaging and its power of emotional transmission. And I sent LOL to everybody I knew. [audience laughter] My sister was getting divorced out in California, [audience chuckle] and I wrote to her, "We're all behind you and beside you. LOL. [audience laughter] Your brother." My father got ill and I sent him LOL in Canada. Everybody I knew, everyone I knew at work, at home, everyone, I sent them LOL. And I was an instant messaging demon.

 

Well, one evening I'm in the lounge at LaGuardia waiting for a plane, I have to travel a lot to talk to people and to speak. And I was IM’ing with Luke and he and I were discussing this, and I was really sort of full of emotion. I hate traveling. I don't like being away from the children. And I wrote to him, "Luke, I just want you to understand that every weekend I'm away is a weekend I hate, but I have to do it to live the life we want to live and to make money for us. LOL. Your dad." [audience laughter] 

 

And suddenly on my screen there at midnight at the lounge in LaGuardia, I see coming across my screen giant letters, like an incoming message from NORAD. Their bombers are on the way. And it says, "Dad, what exactly do you think LOL means? Luke." And I write back, "Lots of love, obviously." [audience chuckle] And he writes back, "No, dad, it means laughing out loud." And I write, "No, it doesn't." [audience laughter] And he writes, "Yes, it does, dad” and of course it does. That's all it means.

 

Well, I was miserable. Not only had I been totally misunderstanding the degree of ridicule that Luke had been shooting at me [audience chuckle] for six months, but I was going to have to repeal six months’ worth of LOL. I was going to have to go through every single person I'd sent an instant message to and apologize for having made fun of them in the midst of their [audience chuckle] suffering. And I thought to myself, "This is the real nature of every communication between parent and child. We send them lots of love, they laugh out loud at us, [audience chuckle] and we don't even know they're doing it."

 

But then we stopped instant messaging each other. And then a couple of months later, we went off on a trip together, Luke and I did, to Savannah, Georgia. And my computer broke and I had to send something in to work. So, I said to Luke, "Can I use your computer?" And he said, "Okay." I said, "Well, just give me your password so I can get on." And he said, "Oh, I don't want to give you, my password." I said, "Luke, why don't you show?" He said, "Well, you give me your password." And I said, "Well, my password is you, Luke94. Your name and the year you were born." And he said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah." I said, "So, tell me, what's your password?" And he said, "It's MontrealPuck." It wasn't exactly dad, but it was pretty close. It was something that we had shared and that secretly he had encoded as his way out into the world. It was as though he were packing his suitcase, but he was packing it with something that I had given him.

 

And from that night on, when we got back to New York, we started IM’ing each other again. And every time we would, we would conclude it LOL. And here I need some music. [audience chuckle] I need a little violin music to make this last part mean something to you. Because it's a sort of Christmas message with 12 days to go before Christmas because here's the thing that I think is true, what I've learned, and that is that through all of those months when Luke was laughing out loud at me and I didn't even know it, he never thought there was something strange about our miscommunication. He never stopped to think that there was something wrong about the way that I was using LOL.

 

Because if you think about it, there are very few times in life when saying "I'm laughing out loud in your presence" and saying "I love you a lot" aren't really close enough to count. They're not exactly the same. If they were, we would never grieve when someone we loved died. But in most of the exchanges we have between ourselves and our children, saying "I'm laughing" and saying "I love you" are a reasonable hit, a near miss, good enough to carry on with.

 

And so, now, every night, the last thing we do, me from my bedroom and Luke from his, is to send each other an instant message. And we always end it. LOL. LOL, Dad. LOL, Luke. And it doesn't matter what it means. It means what it means at that moment to us. Thank you very much.