“How did we ever live in Dallas without cell phones and GPS?” I asked Brittany Wooten as we sat together with Wootens and Keiths at a long table in the Bavarian Grill in Plano.

“I don’t know,” she answered.  “We use GPS everywhere we go now.”

I had found (and was to find) the GPS most helpful in deciding what to do to get around a slowdown in the heavy traffic.  No more need we guess whether to pull off and go another direction.

The Bavarian Grill appears in Open: A Memoir, so we simply had...