I took a course in college my senior year. It was decades ago. The class focused on communications. Computers were not on the desktop, cameras were film based, and telephones were analog with rotary dials. There was no Internet much less text messaging or cell phones. People still wrote letters on paper by hand. I still have some of my old ones. The other choice for a was a typewriter. In the seventies it was not unusual to find people who did not know how to touch type.
I went away to boarding school at the tender age of fourteen. The weekend call home from the telephone booth in the hallway was a lifeline to family and all that was familiar. You might not be able to predict the person who would answer but you learned how to make the most out of whomever you got on the phone. The old fashioned telephone was a great leveler. If you called one of your friends, you could get their parents, but back in the fifties and sixties, we learned how to talk to adults respectfully.
The weekend call became more of a ritual than a lifeline when we started farming in Canada. It was something that kept us connected long after the art of writing letters disappeared. I still love phone calls to my Canadian friends. I enjoy talking to my friends whether I reach the wife or the husband. These calls keep the web of friendship healthy.
A couple decades ago, a friend died. I did not have the opportunity to say good bye to that friend. It caused me to recommit to finding people who had been important in my life. Over the years I made several car trips to Ronceverte, WV, because that was the only way to really visit with my high school Latin teacher who never went beyond the telephone in the world of electronics. He was a little hard to talk to on the telephone but I treasured our visits. He has been dead several years now. I never regretted the effort I made to stay in touch.
Our trips to Mount Airy, NC and Yadkin County, NC to visit friends and family have gotten fewer and farther between each trip as we have aged. The time we spend with elderly relatives is precious. We have lost several over the last few years but the time spent with them was well spent.
Sharing our lives and communicating with others has given us strength to do things we never would have done by ourselves. It has also connected us to history and stories that we might never have known
We were living at the coast when Hurricane Irene made landfall on August 26-27, 2011, about 35 miles to the east of our home near the beaches of Emerald Isle. We received a lot of phone calls from friends and family prior to Irene’s arrival urging us to head for higher grounds than our six feet above sea level. Irene was our first serious storm in our first five years on the coast.
Interestingly, none of the calls came from our three grown children who ranged in age at the time from the late twenties to the mid thirties. I told myself at the time that they knew we were well prepared and tough enough to handle the storm. At sixty-one, I think that was a fair description of us. We were not people who had led quiet lives in one place all their lives. Still Irene roared for thirty-six hours but we only used our generator for three hours.
Perhaps there was something else at play. Most of us older adults have noted that today’s young adults rarely communicate even though they have far more ways to connect than our generation ever had.
One of the other things besides the weekly phone call that happened at military school when I was fourteen was we had an assignment to write a letter home every Sunday night. It was graded, and mailed home for us complete with red marks. Of course no useful communication ever took place in the letters. The weekend phone call was the lifeline to home.
While I quit shining my shoes every morning like I did in military school when I went away to college, I didn’t drop the ritual of the weekend call home and writing letters. Even after graduating from college, moving to Nova Scotia to farm, and getting married, the calls continued. We added a weekly call to the parents of my wife, Glenda. We also wrote letters in cursive to family and friends. Long distance calls for much of our early married life were extremely costly but they remained important to our mental health so we rarely missed one.
Calling home for all those decades was always something of a surprise, you never knew who was going to answer the phone, but 99% of the time they were happy to hear your voice if not your message. Almost always you felt better after talking to them.
I think the old cold calling home on a rotary phone helped us be the people we are today. It helped us build strong networks of support and advice. It gave us skills that the current younger generations may never master. The world will be lonelier and poorer because of that.
Stay up with the Goose Speaks commentary on our country’s situation in “Time to Trust Our Own Eyes” either for free at Substack on as a simple HTML flat file with a different name, “Time to Speak Out,” at my Crystal Coast website.
Our technological infirmity 