Last night when I answered my phone, my oldest daughter’s face popped up on the screen in my hand even though she is far away in CA. “Hi Mom! How are you?” That was the beginning of a 45-minute Face Time conversation with her, my granddaughter, and her best friend. Earlier in the day my son had arranged a Zoom meeting with my other daughter and her husband in VT. I don’t have the knowledge or the laptop to do that alone…yet. I’m still learning and becoming more comfortable with these new communication tools.
If you’re close to my age you probably remember someone- a teacher or news reporter- telling you about “phones of the future” and how they would show us the faces of our conversation partners. It seemed like something from the Jetson’s. I know I looked at our black rotary phone many times and tried to figure out how the great inventors would actually accomplish such a magical feat.
My great aunt Martha talked of arriving in Oklahoma in a wagon and living long enough to watch a man walk on the moon. I felt like that yesterday. When I was a child in California, we could only call my grandmother in Oklahoma if we had saved a lot of money, waited patiently for the operator to connect us, and kept our conversation very short. Thanksgiving wasn’t important enough for any of that, so we waited for Christmas. Mom got to talk the most, because it was her mom, and she missed her so much. I usually just told her I liked my present and then handed the phone to one of my brothers to do the same. The next time I talked to my grandmother was sometime in the summer during our annual visit.
We’ve come so far. We’ve enhanced our communication so much. And I know that somewhere there is some tech wizard figuring out how we can do something even more remarkable. Teleportation?
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