The text that reads cold was typed by someone in a hurry
By Delia Marchetti, Staff writer · · 2 min read
The text says "ok."
That is the whole text. Lowercase. No period. She has read it three times and she has decided it is cold. She had written four lines about Thanksgiving and whether he was bringing anyone and whether the girl he was bringing eats turkey, and he wrote back "ok."
She shows it to me. I read it once.
It is not cold. It is a man on a loading dock with a phone in one hand. I know this because I asked him, later, and that is where he was. He did not remember the text. He remembered that she had asked about Thanksgiving and that he had said yes.
He said yes. That was the whole message, to him. Yes, I am coming. Yes, she eats turkey. Yes, stop worrying. He compressed all of that into two letters because his hands were full and because, in his experience, his mother does not need more than that to know he is coming.
She needed more than that.
I should say what she wrote. I read it. It was good. It asked whether he was coming, and whether he was bringing the girl, and whether the girl ate turkey or whether she should do a chicken too, and it said the ham was already ordered, and it said she had found the tablecloth his grandmother made, and it ended with a question about his truck. Four lines. It took her, she said, about twenty minutes, because she rewrote the part about the girl three times so it would not sound like it was asking what it was asking.
This is the thing about the phone. It carries the words and drops the loading dock. She gets "ok" at her kitchen table with the whole afternoon to look at it. He sent "ok" between two pallets and forgot it before the truck pulled out.
I told her this. She said she knew. She said knowing did not help.
A friend of mine, who has two daughters and no sons, says the daughters write back in paragraphs and that she would give a great deal for an "ok." I told her that. She did not find it comforting. She said a paragraph you can argue with. An "ok" you can only stare at.
She still has the text. She has not deleted it. I asked why and she said she was going to show it to him at Thanksgiving, and I asked what she thought that would accomplish, and she said probably nothing.