Just thinking...

When I was a kid, my mother and grandmother exchanged letters every week. Letters were THE means of communication. It was a big deal to have a pen pal. We loved waiting for the mailman to come!

Mom chatted with the neighbors on our 4-party phone, but long distance calls were rare, special, and usual short...or meant bad news.

When I was a teenager, there were no cordless phones, and I certainly didn't have the luxury of a princess phone in my bedroom. My private calls meant stretching the cord as far is it would go and hiding under Dad's desk. There was no call waiting, and if the second party on the line picked up, it meant you needed to wrap it up.

It was such a big deal to get a private line thirty-odd years ago, and to have an extension upstairs! But long distance was still expensive, and letters were still the thing.

I spent much more time on the phone when cordless came out and I could talk while doing housework and such. And when I got my electric typewriter, and then computer, how many more letters I could churn out!!

Email ended a lot of the letter-writing, at least in my circle, but one of the benefits of email was that now I could email somebody early in the morning or late at night, as opposed to calling on the phone and waking up somebody!

Well, now I'm back a step--don't dare send an email (or Facebook message) at 5 a.m. because everybody gets a beep or music on the smart phone lying next to the pillow when an email comes through.

In a conversation the other day I asked, "What if somebody doesn't have a cell phone?" She looked at me as if I'd asked, "What if somebody has two noses?"

Smart phones, iPads, text, email, Facebook, etc. We communicate all the time now, but do we really communicate? Sometimes I wonder.