Two a Days

    For the most part, I resist phone calls with people I can simply write to.  Don't get me wrong.  I love conversation, with its misapprehensions and sometimes hilarious mistakes and I like the opportunity to ad-lib but I grew up in a different time when people wrote letters.
    In a time before that if you lived in a major city there were two a day mail deliveries. This was before telephones became ubiquitous.  People could exchange notes in the course of the day.  In case you missed it;  people could text back and forth with the aid of the Postal Service.  Technology changes.  People, not so much.
    I found a shoe box filled with these little notes and postcards exchanged between my maternal great-grandfather and his son and my grandmother in about 1917.  He had been born in 1846  and was a Union veteran of the Civil War.  They were just playful little notes just like you would expect from texts today.  He always wrote as though he had a smile on his face.  I never met him but I've always liked him for that. It's kind of interesting to note he would have been in his early 70's and my grandfather would have been about 25, my grandmother, about 18.  You wouldn't know that from the tone or content of the notes.  Just an easy exchange between friends.  I only mention that because it pleases me more than a century later. It's a goal in a family devoutly to be wished.
    Then, for a long time, people wrote letters back and forth.  A lot of people had little stationary kits.  I never did but I always had a favorite pen, envelopes, an address book and a roll of stamps. I maintained a wide correspondence as it was known then.
    Somewhere in the late '80s that seemed to stop.  I guess long distance rates went down and people just talked on the phone.  Of course, now there is no such thing as a long distance call.  When you think about the billing and convenience,  cell phones really have produced a revolution. We take it for granted now but if you think back it's kinda odd.  Everywhere you go people have a phone stuck to their ear.  Twenty years ago,  Garrison Keillor said he'd never have a cell phone because if God had wanted him to walk down the street having loud,  one-way conversations,  He would have made him insane.  I'd be willing to bet Keillor has a cell phone now.
    In the last several years I've noticed I have, again, a wide correspondence thru email and it's almost on that kinda two a day basis.
    So, I guess this all comes under the heading: The more things change the more they remain the same.  And of course, by writing this,  I'm putting off writing the three emails I'm behind.