Keeping in Touch

 

Over my birthday croissant and cup of tea, I was catching up with a friend of 30 years. 

We started talking about how friends stayed in touch. For the two of us it could be anything from intensive to every few months with checks on Facebook or irregular emails. 

Of course living in different countries part of the time explains some of it. The rest is both of us have busy lives with clear priorities and hierarchies of the most to the least important. 

We have reached an age where we cut through the BS of life for things that are important. 

When we were young the telephone and post were the way to keep track of the comings and goings.

I remember going to the post office to see if there was a letter from my then fiancé who was stationed in D.C. rather than wait for the next day's delivery. "Bunny," the man who worked behind the counter, would always smile when he handed me a letter and shake his head sadly when there wasn't.

There were party line phones and I remember before there was dials, an operator took the number you were calling. When it was a friend, we might exchange plans.

Long distance calls were expensive. In the 1960s when I was living in Stuttgart and called my mother in Massachusetts, we had a nice conversation, which wasn't that long. She cried when she got the bill - $400, a fortune in those days. Now I can talk to my daughter from Geneva, Switzerland to Malden, MA for as long as we want for free on Facebook.

And if we don't use FB, there's email, Skype, ZOOM, blogs and internet etc., but my friend pointed out that a friend of hers from kindergarten prefers post cards to all the digital choices.

I chat with my daughter on Facebook at least once a week. Other people might telephone weekly. My grandmother and her brother, one in Massachusetts and one in New Jersey always talked regularly on Sunday night. This would be a good thing because she could ask where her sister-in-law put this or that in her desire to be helpful when they visited.

I wish there was more time to sit face to face with the many people I care about it and still have the time to do all the other things in my life. Meanwhile, I'm grateful for the digital age. In many cases it works better than waiting for a letter.