“Life is full of awe and grace and truth, mystery and wonder. I live in that atmosphere.”
The morning is fall at its finest. The sun is shining though the leaves still hanging on the trees in the backyard. The temperature is in the high 40’s. A slight breeze comes and goes. My deck and front yard are covered in brown, mostly oak leaves. The dogs bring pieces of the leaves in on their paws. I keep a broom close at hand.
When I was a kid, I watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon. He walked upright, looked like an amphibian, had webbed hands and quite the ugly face with eyes which never moved. Many years later I found out he was a piscine and amphibian humanoid, a creature of myth and legend. He scared the boat load of scientists and crew, even killed a couple after they attacked them. There was, of course, a woman who screamed and screamed and was captured by the Creature. I never questioned the effects. He looked like a gill man. He could breathe underwater. My nephew, who is now forty, saw the movie when he was a kid. He laughed most of the way through. He thought the movie was silly. His comments cut me to the quick. He said you can see the scuba tank the creature is wearing under his fake skin. I never noticed.
Phones were once a wonder. The first telephone I remember when I was young was the phone you picked up to get to the operator who connected your call. Next we got a rotary phone with a party line. The rotary phone made a clicking noise after you entered each number. I loved that sound. I used to listen to Mrs. McGafffigan, but she knew when we on the line and used to yell at us to hang up the phone. We did get our own line. Our first phones were black. All phones were black.
I used to be amazed at all the changes and historical events my grandmother lived through. She was born in 1898. I suspect my niece and nephews think about me in the same way. When I have to indicate my year of birth by scrolling through years, it takes a while to get to 1947. I have seen the plots of the science fiction books I read as a kid become reality, but I am still amazed by the world. I hold close my sense of wonder. I still don’t notice the scuba tank.
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November 13, 2023 at 2:36 pm
Hi Kat,
The clouds we had all weekend are now giving way to a little sunshine. The high today is forecasted to be 65°.
When I was a kid, like you, telephones were amazing to me also. Households had only one rotary telephone which was made of black metal with a rotary dial. I remember my parents having to call the long distance operator to place a long distance call. My father would send my mother a signal when he traveled that he had reached his destination. He would make a collect long distance call. The operator would call and ask my mother if she would accept a call from a Mr. Smith. She would tell the operator that she would not accept a call from that person. This way, my mother would know that my father had arrived and the call from the operator was a free signal.
I don’t think we ever had a party line. However, when we had more than one telephone in the house, you could carefully lift the receiver and listen in on the conversation on the other phone.
Today most of us are walking around with a miniature computer that we affectionately call, a cell phone. We can make unlimited calls to anyone in the country.
I was amazed that my grandparents lived into their late seventies and eighties before there was antibiotics and modern medicine. They were born in the 1880s. When my mother passed away in 1961, my grandmother, her mother, said, “When I was a young woman in Europe people didn’t die from cancer”. I replied, “When you were young people just died, they didn’t know the reason”.
November 13, 2023 at 8:11 pm
Hi Bob,
We will go down to the 30’s tonight. That seems to be the weather pattern. Maybe we’ll have rain tomorrow which should have been what I’d expect after I washed the kitchen floor.
I also remember we made calls after 7 when the cost was less. We seldom made long distant calls, no one to call. I do remember making collect calls. I think everyone did the same thing: call collect to let the family know we were home safely.
We had the party line at first as It was less expensive, but my parents got sick of Mrs.McGaffigan so we got a single line. We had only one phone for the longest time. I remember the yellow wall phone in the kitchen.
The first computers filled rooms. I remember the computer room at school. The computer took up half the room, and the AC was on all the time to keep the computer cool.
My great grand-mother lived to be 91. My grandmother was 90. They were the long-lifers in the family.
November 13, 2023 at 8:40 pm
Many years ago, around 1981, I was flying to New York as a passenger. I had a small Sharp electronic pocket address book that I was cleaning out addresses I no longer needed. The man sitting next to me asked me how much memory I had in the device. I replied, eight kilobytes. He told me that he designed the navigation computers for NASA on the Apollo program. He said to me that the onboard computer that they that went to the moon had less than eight kilobytes of memory. My iPhone has 128 Gigabytes of memory. Progress according to Moore’s law. 🙂
November 14, 2023 at 3:22 pm
It is unbelievable that such small devices are so powerful. I remember in the movie HIdden Figures one of the women taught herself Fortran. They had just installed an IBM but they couldn’t get it to work. She went in, no one was there, and she pressed a few buttons, and it started to work. Her name was Dorothy and she became NASA’s first African American supervisor.