The (good and not so good) old days

 It's funny how conversations have turned, recently. Last week, we had a meeting of the yarn group and we were talking about our parents' deaths. Not a cheerful subject, but one person's father had just died, only 11 weeks after her mother had died. She did not have to rush back because the memorial service was not going to be until May. It was a different story in January. And it was even different just the week before because her father was failing fast and she was faced with the question of dropping everything and rushing off to the airport. Distance makes all this hard on us. 

I remember a friend whose father was dying and she jumped on a plane but he died before she got there. She was broken up about that but was present for her mother. Another friend went back and stayed and stayed and stayed until her mother died. I was present almost at the end. I almost stayed. My father insisted that I go home where my new job was waiting for me. I went home. I got the number at the Atlanta airport (not the 800 number) so that my uncle could contact the airline and me in case I should not get on the flight to Paris. The call did not come; I got on the flight. When I got home, I got a call that he had just died. I did jump back on a plane the next morning. More for my mother. But I get that my friend last week did not rush back. This was her second parent to go and there was no parent to console if she went back. 

When my grandmother died, no one thought to call me and I didn't learn of her death until I received the letter from my brother (probably 10 days after he sent it) telling me he had just gotten back from her funeral. When my other grandmother died, though, 10 years later, I did get a call. There was still no question that I would jump on a plane to go to the funeral. 

Later, with another friend and a similar subject, we were talking about how slow communication was when we first arrived in France 50 some years ago. We didn't receive phone calls because we didn't have phones. Landlines! There was a waiting list for phones. We rarely made calls to the U.S. They were expensive. I made collect calls. Making any kind of call meant going to the post office and requesting the call, then, waiting an hour or two for the call to go through. Even calling from someone's home required waiting for the call to go through. (My brother-in-law had the kind of job that required a home phone for emergency contact.) Our main means of communication was via aerograms. 

Aerograms were one sheet of extra-long, lightweight blue paper that was pre-stamped at a lower rate than an air-mail stamp. You could get a long letter written using both sides of the paper, carefully avoiding the address section. It would take about 10 days for this to arrive in the U.S. and another 10 days for the reply. 

By the '90s, there was a system whereby we could call a local number that would call back and we'd dial the U.S. number. This was much cheaper than the PTT rate for calling. Much cheaper does not mean cheap, though, so we didn't call often. We were simply not in the habit of calling. By the time internet came to our family via Compuserve, we used that system to collect email in one call and then reconnect to send email. Email replaced the aerogram. In France, we had Minitel back in the early '80s, but we did not have domestic internet service, yet. Shortly after, though, AOL set itself up in France (or was Club-internet first?) Our family was early an early adapter. With AOL came the Buddy List for chats. 

Then came cell phones. Triple-play internet service (internet, landline, TV) and with that, free international phone calls from the landline. And WhatsApp replaced Skype for free calls from the mobile. 

My friend whose father just died got a phone call. She was at a party. It got me thinking that maybe slower communication was not such a bad thing.