In the good old days...

My mother and her sisters kept up with each other and the happenings in their families with a chain letter. You know, you wrote a letter about what was going on with your family, added it to the letters your sisters had written and forwarded to you, removing the letter of the sister you are mailing the packet to. Simple. Sure. Slow. If there was important news they wrote each other directly.

Telephone calls were rare until much later in the family history. For one thing, they were expensive; in 1955 a 10-minute daytime long distance call could cost as much as $7.08, not counting all the fees and taxes. Now there's a whole generation out there unaware that long distance used to cost extra. I wonder if my children even remember that there were "station-to-station" calls and "person-to-person" calls. They do know about different rates for different times of day and weekends - at least my daughter does, because of the cost of calling from overseas. As I recall, before they left Prague our international rate was down to $1.00 a minute.

I cannot tell you how important E-mail was to us when Julie and Jason were overseas. It didn't happen easily at first; Compuserve was about the only service available to them and it initially required an international call for them to connect with a server. Remember dial-up modems? Later, they could connect through Charles University and later still to local numbers in Prague (by the way, I was startled to see that Compuserve is still in business).

Email was a daily occurrence;  we came in from work and checked for the days message; we wrote back each evening. They picked up our messages first thing in the morning and told us of the day's activities each evening. If we went three days with no email they knew they were going to get a phone call.

Now the chain-letters are blogs, or Facebook comments, or Gmail. We post, we publish, we chat, we text. We see pictures of the weekend. We hear about dining experiences within hours; we check out the latest craft project in progress. We even get glimpses from the posts of people we don't know; Disneyland looked like a hoot, Jericho. Glad you enjoyed the retreat, Julie.

And of course, if all else fails, we pick up the phone. No additional cost.