Future Shocks

Yesterday, I Skyped with a friend. The horrifying thing about Skype is not that another person's talking head suddenly appears in your house, but that you get to see what your own talking head looks like when it shows up in somebody else's house. Not pretty.

Who woulda thunk it, back in the day, when prototypes for future video phones were the stuff of fantasy. Back when deafening busy signals screamed at you to just try again later and there was no such thing as caller i.d. to save you from, well, just about everybody. But now, if there's someone you really do want to talk to and that person happens to live far away, that person can seem so virtually close that a hug isn't out of the question.

One of my favorite television shows, Modern Family, walked away with a minivan full of Emmys last night. Oddly, the folks in Modern Family don't need things like Skype; the entire clan lives within spitting distance from each other. But the sweetly hilarious goings on in that show would have been as fantastical to us, back in the day, as call waiting or caller i.d. And I'm not just referring to the flamingly gay couple with the adopted child or the family patriarch and his sexy Latina bride.

The center of the family in the show is as garden variety as it gets: pretty mom, henpecked dad, three kids who are often at each others throats but band together when it counts, like, say, when they walk in on mom and dad "doin it." But this is no sixties style family. The mom worries constantly about how badly she's screwing up her kids. The dad tries really hard to understand what she's worrying about. And the kids seem painfully aware of their parents' limitations.

Back in the day, my mom didn't really seem too preoccupied with what she might be doing wrong; she was way too busy criticizing me. My dad didn't have to waste time worrying about mom's psyche; he just came home, got fed, and did his best to keep the peace so the evening wouldn't be a total bust. And, I can't speak for the rest of you, but I actually thought my parents knew what they were doing. Funny.

The future has arrived with a bang, and it can be very scary. Faraway people appear in your living room, and your kids are the first to remind you that you are leading them down the path to years of costly therapy. Gay relatives have long come out of the closet, and nuclear families come in all sorts of blended configurations.

Scary, maybe, but all good.