My grandson David came over for my birthday three months ago and brought a cardboard box. He spent an hour drilling holes into my front porch siding. He said it was a Ring doorbell. It cost him a hundred dollars.

He told me it would keep me safe and that now I could see exactly who was at the door without having to walk all the way from the kitchen. I thought it sounded like a bit of a nuisance, but I thanked him anyway. He showed me how to use the app on my phone. It looked simple enough.

The first week was a disaster. I got forty-seven notifications on my phone. The mailman was there. The neighbor’s cat was there. The wind blew a plastic bag across the porch, and my phone started dinging like a slot machine. I felt like I had to answer every single one. I would tap the little green microphone icon and say, “Who is there?” I thought it was just being polite. If someone is standing on my porch, it is only right to say hello. The FedEx driver got so tired of me asking him about his day through the speaker that he started leaving all my packages at the house next door.

By the second week, I had stopped caring about the privacy settings. I broadcast my phone calls to the porch speaker without even thinking. My friend Helen called me to go over her colonoscopy results. It took eleven minutes. I left the porch audio on the whole time. The entire block heard every detail about Helen’s digestive health. The Homeowners Association sent me a formal letter by Thursday. They said I was disturbing the peace. I told them that I was just keeping up with my social life.

The third week, I decided I wanted a better view, so I expanded the motion zone to include the entire street. I figured I should know what was happening in my neighborhood. I started greeting passing cars as they drove by. I would watch them through the camera and shout, “Drive safe!” or “Slow down!” One jogger actually stopped in the middle of the road and filed a formal noise complaint with the city. I was just trying to be a good citizen.

David came over to check on me last Friday. He looked at my phone and sighed. “Grandma, you have answered three hundred and forty times this month,” he said. He tapped the screen to show me a graph. “You have an eighty-seven percent response rate. That is higher than most customer service businesses.” I told him I was just being polite. He looked at me like I had lost my mind. I told him it was important to be present in the world. He just shook his head.