This is an opinion column

Back before GPS, people got lost. I was one of them.

Years ago, I was driving my little granddaugher to a petting zoo. The roads were poorly marked and my navigating skills were poor, too. When we wound around looking for the entrance, my granddaughter was quiet in the back seat.

Soon I learned why. She’d drawn an imaginary map with her crayons, complete with roads, animals, and a feeding station. She passed it on to me and pretty soon we were there.

She believed her map showed us the way. A family story was born that wouldn’t have come into being if we’d checked our phones—not invented yet—or our car GPS, not on the horizon.

Those of us who didn’t grow up with screens in front of our faces clutch them firmly now. But if we’d had them way back then, what would we have missed?

In those days, parents gave us this command: “Go outside and play.” Nobody ever said, “Go outside and stare at your screens.”

My friends and I would have missed crawling through our jungle, which is what we called the weedy, vacant lot behind our row of houses. It must have been full of snakes, but we never saw them. We called the feral cats who lived there lions and tigers to fit in with the jungle theme.

We’d have missed skipping rocks on the pond on our friend’s farm. The good ones skipped three times before sinking. We had to get the angle just right before we threw them out over the water, hoping to beat everyone’s record.

We’d have missed tying boards and logs together to make rafts that floated in muddy creeks two feet deep. When they sank to the bottom, we left them there as shipwrecks or hauled them on shore to be rebuilt for another day.

We’d have missed indoor play, too. The pale blue waves that washed over the front porch of our house weren’t from the Gulf of Mexico but from my grandmother’s cast-off blue coverlet, its feathers poking through the silk. When my friends and I rolled around in it, we could hear the ocean’s roar and feel the tide, or so we told ourselves.

We’d have missed playing store in my dining room where captive customers (parents) used Monopoly money to buy canned goods we’d borrowed from the kitchen pantry or books we’d taken down from the shelves.

We’d have missed paper doll competitions, toy soldier marches, Barbie Doll beauty pageants, and villages made from shoe boxes, surrounding a small mirror that was the village pond. We’d have missed placing pennies on the railroad tracks and watching as the train roared by and flattened that penny.

We’d have missed lying on a rug in the backyard, staring at the night sky back when it glowed brighter than it does now. We can learn the names of the constellations on our screen, but isn’t it miraculous to look up at them on a summer night?

Most of us hold the world in the palm of our hands. In seconds, we can “google” maps, recipes, poems, addresses-anything we want to know. What we’ve gained is amazing. But what we’ve lost is immeasurable.

We can’t go back from here, but we can make small changes. No phones at the table. No phones when someone is talking to us. No phones in meetings. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but maybe we can keep it in our purse or pocket a lot more often.

Beth Thames can be reached at [email protected]