We learned from our son recently that our grandson Wesley is a pen pal. Yep, a genuine pen pal.
He and a female classmate dated as high school seniors, but chose to attend different colleges. They also chose to keep in touch through letters, interestingly, written in long hand and delivered by the postal service.
They had agreed, apparently, that their missives would be less trivial, more deliberative, more thoughtful than emails or text messages.
For me, it harkened back to an early time in my life when Ruth and I exchanged letters the summer before we were married. We were pen pals. We talked on the phone maybe twice during that time. Long distance time on the phone was costly. So letters were our primary way to keep in touch.
And those long distance calls had a ritual. A long distant caller would rehearse mentally the thoughts one wanted to say or the questions one wanted answered. One could anticipate someone standing by, pointing at a watch or clock to remind the caller that fees were adding up.
When we lived in Spartan Village at MSU, we had no phone, and no television for that matter, so we would trundle down to the apartment of a popular couple who had a phone if we needed to call someone. We would leave a token fee for the privilege of their phone time, and a profuse thank you. We would always watch our time carefully.
Today long distance calls are prepaid mostly, so a caller can listen or talk as long as the mind will bear. But whenever I make long distant calls, my mind goes to those early considerations for a moment or two.
And local calls needed their own considerations. Almost everyone in the neighborhood was on a party line. When someone on the party line was using the phone, the other parties couldn’t call out. And there were invariably loquacious parties who would monopolize the phone time. If there were an emergency, a troubled caller would have to persuade the gossiper to get off the line so a call could be made. Emergency meant difference things to different people, so there were inevitable grievances.
Today the telephone means more privacy … and more intrusion. Sophisticated phones today give everyone a private line, with a special system for emergencies – 911. There are no party lines, but with a cell phone, a caller can text individuals and groups limited only by the numbers in one’s chosen digital social world, and the personal time to operate the phone. But it gives unassailable power to telemarketers and nuisance callers, invading our privacy.
With computers, we have the capability not only to hear our families and friends, but also to see their images through programs like Skype in real time. With email, we can contact family members and friends as fast as we can compose our thoughts. We don’t even have to place a record on a turntable to hear a melody. With Echo, we can shout out the name of the song we wish to hear, and it is immediately played for us for our listening pleasure.
Those of us who witnessed the evolution of much of these technological miracles, marvel at it. But it all seems so “now, now, now,” bringing new demands of constant immediacy. We’ve all seen the groups of people in restaurants clustered around the table, each poring over an individual cell phone, spared the burden of having talk directly to each other.
For the past several years, the cousins and their spouses from one wing of our family gather for a annual reunion and an elegant meal. We are all in our seventies and eighties. During the year, we seldom email one another, call only when catastrophies occur or reunion specifics need to be made. At the gathering, there is much laughing, good story-telling, and moving reminiscences. No one uses a cell phone. We part happy and liking each other. There is something about the personal touch.
It reminds me why I can never become a fully participating member of the digital culture.