First published September 30, 2017.
Mom and I talk on the phone about once a week, never less than an hour - sometimes two. I know women who don't talk to their moms at all, others three or four times a day. We live three states apart, and a long jabber session one afternoon a week feels right for us.
I have found that lately I keep a notebook handy, and when Mom starts talking about something of genealogical interest, I jot it down. It does not always concern our ancestors, a lot of times it's something from her life that I find interesting. When my husband and I lived on the adjoining farm and Dad would wander over for coffee, I did that with him, only on random pieces of whatever was handy, including, much to my dismay now - paper towels (not recommended, by the way). We have moved and those little scraps are still turning up, but I've progressed, thankfully, into a notebook for Mom.
Dad's last remaining sister passed away last week. She lived on the other side of the country in an area not frequented by large airports and it would have been a long, difficult trip for Mom. She bought beautiful cards and wrote letters to my cousins about her life with their mom.
I loved listening to her talk about the stories, and much to my surprise, there were details I didn't know. I knew she had met dad as a teenager when she visited his church, but I thought it was because his sister and her were running around together, not through a mutual friend. (Mom and his sister were cheerleaders, but at different schools.) I also did not know Gayle was working at a telephone company after Dad had been drafted and arranged for Mom and Dad to talk on the phone. Dad was, of all places, stationed in Hawaii between the Korea and Viet Nam Wars.
Most of all, I did not know Mom lived with Dad's sister and brother (twins) when they first got married. Both of Dad's parents were deceased and somehow he and the twins, who all graduated from the same class, were all still living together a couple years later.
It was hard for me to picture not only did Mom not have a phone in her apartment while she waited for Dad to finish his hitch, but my maternal grandparents did not have one on their farm. My grandkids will think the same thing, I'm sure, about me tip-toeing into technology. I am so old I watched Steve Jobs in a live-streamed broadcast (a first for the corporation where I worked) talk about all of the exciting things he was going to do with an iPhone: connect to the internet and for goodness sake, take pictures. Seriously? Why would anyone want to take pictures with a phone, I remembered thinking, especially since I owned three cameras and two bags of gear, including gear that wouldn't fit in a bag! And internet on the phone? It was years before we could even get it to a computer out on our farm.
We are the link between our grandparents and our grandchildren. Technology, however infantile, is one of the many stories we can talk about to our descendants.
Dear Grandchildren: Yes, the photograph above is what telephones looked like when I was well into my teen-age years! We were on a "party-line" meaning we all had our own phone numbers but the nearest 6-10 neighbors all shared the same line to wherever phone conversation go with the cable connected to the telephone poles along the road (I don't know how it worked in town, I always lived in the country.)
It also meant if we picked up the phone, we would hear other people's conversations. This was an easy way to spread gossip ("Guess what I heard Jane Smith saying when I picked up the phone the other day!" True story. If you were on the phone too long when somebody else wanted to use it, they were click it several times with the receiver, or if they were having a particularly bad day, they'd just flat-out tell you to hang up.
Mom and Dad got a private line after I left home but they were more expensive. So was calling long distance, a person was charged extra by the minute; the only thing that was flat rate was the cost of having the phone in the house, something like $18/month and local calls only were free. Oh, and Time & Temperature calls. We did not have 911 then, another story...
Mom and Dad had the same phone number for 58 years although Mom did get a cell phone later in life.
Mom and I talk on the phone about once a week, never less than an hour - sometimes two. I know women who don't talk to their moms at all, others three or four times a day. We live three states apart, and a long jabber session one afternoon a week feels right for us.
I have found that lately I keep a notebook handy, and when Mom starts talking about something of genealogical interest, I jot it down. It does not always concern our ancestors, a lot of times it's something from her life that I find interesting. When my husband and I lived on the adjoining farm and Dad would wander over for coffee, I did that with him, only on random pieces of whatever was handy, including, much to my dismay now - paper towels (not recommended, by the way). We have moved and those little scraps are still turning up, but I've progressed, thankfully, into a notebook for Mom.
Dad's last remaining sister passed away last week. She lived on the other side of the country in an area not frequented by large airports and it would have been a long, difficult trip for Mom. She bought beautiful cards and wrote letters to my cousins about her life with their mom.
I loved listening to her talk about the stories, and much to my surprise, there were details I didn't know. I knew she had met dad as a teenager when she visited his church, but I thought it was because his sister and her were running around together, not through a mutual friend. (Mom and his sister were cheerleaders, but at different schools.) I also did not know Gayle was working at a telephone company after Dad had been drafted and arranged for Mom and Dad to talk on the phone. Dad was, of all places, stationed in Hawaii between the Korea and Viet Nam Wars.
Most of all, I did not know Mom lived with Dad's sister and brother (twins) when they first got married. Both of Dad's parents were deceased and somehow he and the twins, who all graduated from the same class, were all still living together a couple years later.
We are the link between our grandparents and our grandchildren. Technology, however infantile, is one of the many stories we can talk about to our descendants.
Dear Grandchildren: Yes, the photograph above is what telephones looked like when I was well into my teen-age years! We were on a "party-line" meaning we all had our own phone numbers but the nearest 6-10 neighbors all shared the same line to wherever phone conversation go with the cable connected to the telephone poles along the road (I don't know how it worked in town, I always lived in the country.)
It also meant if we picked up the phone, we would hear other people's conversations. This was an easy way to spread gossip ("Guess what I heard Jane Smith saying when I picked up the phone the other day!" True story. If you were on the phone too long when somebody else wanted to use it, they were click it several times with the receiver, or if they were having a particularly bad day, they'd just flat-out tell you to hang up.
Mom and Dad got a private line after I left home but they were more expensive. So was calling long distance, a person was charged extra by the minute; the only thing that was flat rate was the cost of having the phone in the house, something like $18/month and local calls only were free. Oh, and Time & Temperature calls. We did not have 911 then, another story...
Mom and Dad had the same phone number for 58 years although Mom did get a cell phone later in life.
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