If I didn't rely on my trusty, dusty Rolodex, I would lose such a jumble of memories.

Just this week, I was looking for the home number of a friend when my hand paused over the yellowed card for my parents. A black line was drawn through my mother's name, and over it was the explanation written in my 12-year-old daughter's hand: "Only in spirit."

She wrote the mournful note after my mother died in 1999. My guess is that she came across the card soon after when she was looking for my father's phone number to check in and see how he was doing.

Only three little words, but they are tethered to such powerful memories. I remember her forced cheerfulness in those days, the way she called him night after night, trying to make him laugh.

For a few moments, I was back in our old living room, listening to my daughter on the phone in the kitchen as she pushed aside her own grief to tend to her grandpa's broken heart. I remember her long pauses and sympathetic sighs, but also the occasional giggles, evidence that her jollying reached my father in a way that all my efforts could not.

What an unexpected gift tucked in the cards of my Rolodex.

Many people I know now keep all their phone numbers and addresses on desktop computers, cell phones and BlackBerrys. It's so much easier, they say, so right-at-your-fingertips.

Maybe so, but I can't part with the handwritten entries that tell so many stories from the lives of people I love.

Deaths are recorded in my Rolodex. So are births. Friends get married, divorced, remarried. I note their every transition. Some families have so many different last names that their cards looks like the addresses for communes. I smile at the second chances, the hope that refuses to die.

Friends move, too, but not from my Rolodex. I don't press a button to delete or edit. Instead, I squeeze in new addresses, sometimes filling the front and back of a card. My friend Fleka has moved often, and her file card tells the story of a life lived for adventure. Every time I look up her address in Florida, I think of the time she flew back to Ohio just to sit on my front porch and share champagne and Bugles.

"Friend for life," I wrote on her card that year.

I am card file-dependent, and rely on pocket calendars that evolve into diaries every year. Most of my friends, especially the younger ones, find this habit amusing, what with their cell phones and hand-held directories always at the ready. Ask them for a phone number, and they whip out their cell phones and start clicking. God only knows when they last dialed a phone number.

At least one researcher thinks this may be a problem as we age. I call him my new best friend, but his real name is Ian Robertson. He's a professor of psychology at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and his two-month study suggests that our reliance on technology may be addling our brains.

Finally, a guy on my side.

He's got numbers, too: Nearly 60 percent of those surveyed said they couldn't remember passwords and important phone numbers. One-third of those younger than 30 couldn't even remember their home phone numbers.

"People have more to remember these days, and they are relying on technology for their memory," Robertson told the Irish Independent. "But the less you use of your memory, the poorer it becomes. With phones now recording numbers automatically, the notion of stretching your brain cells to remember them is becoming positively quaint."

Here's a boost for baby boomers: We out-performed the youngsters. The under-30 crowd who relied on technology did worse in tests than the over-50 group, who committed more to memory.

That reminds me: It's time to exercise this memory of mine and update the Rolodex.

Karen and Joe's son, Will, is off to college, and Ellen is starting high school.

My son's fiancee will become his wife in just three short weeks.

Someone else now lives in my parents' house.

Grandpa's spirit lives on.

Duly noted.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… And His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz ([email protected]) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.