Communication

When my parents immigrated to Canada with my younger brother and me in the 1950’s their only means of communicating with relatives in Germany was by letter.  The farm where my father worked had a telephone (party line) but none of my relatives had telephones and besides the first transatlantic telephone cables didn’t come into use until the late 1950s.  My relatives didn’t ever see some of their grandchildren or nephews and niece again nor could they share in our daily lives.  I never thought a lot about what they were missing, though I did miss them for a time.  It wasn’t until my own grandson arrived that I realized how extremely difficult it must have been for them to see part of their family leave.  One of my brothers went back with my mother after several years; I didn’t get back until 25 years after we left.  The brother who was born here has never been to Germany to see relatives.

Now we have Skype as well as telephones, and lots of airline flights.

I regularly Skype with my son and his family. My grandson performs songs for me and shows me his toys or tells me what he has been doing.   He asks me what I have at my place so I show him the toys I have here and sometimes I tell him stories about them.  I carry my laptop around so he can see my house again and keep track of the changing seasons in my back yard.  Sometimes I sing to him and we do a puzzle musical puzzle together – he tells me which instrument and I take it out and put it back so he can hear the tune.

Recently one of the members of my book club said that she and her nephew are reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild together using speaker phones.  She encourages him to look up the places mentioned in the book using the atlas, Google and other sources; she also suggests different methods for looking up words.  Her nephew is bonding with her and also learning about how to do research and the value of checking more than one source.

This reminded me again of how creative people are and can be.  I was lucky enough to have my grandson living in the same city for the first two years of his life.  If I hadn’t I’d have had to find ways to sing him lullabies and stories so that we could keep in touch (as we do now) between the times I can fly or take the bus to see him.  It’s much easier now that they are closer to go and visit in person more often, but even so, I am grateful for all of the technological advances that have made us indeed a part of the global village.