Living in this 21st century is far more complicated for me than it was in my 20th. When the black dial phone rang I always answered if I could. Now to talk to a friend I have been told that I must first text and ask, “Can I call you in an hour?”
Life in my century was free of some of the present distractions as in the availability of over 1000 films that I can watch on my large flat screen TV with Netflix (if I wanted to).
Then there is the complication of having a land line and a smart phone. Nobody will call you for the whole day and when you happen to be on one of them the other will ring (or whatever other sound you have programmed to make you different from anybody else).
The discovery of this little album, lovingly put together by my Rosemary, has given me the inclination to pause my preparation from my forthcoming trip to Buenos Aires. As has happened so often now, I have thought how it is that when in our youth we experience a pleasant moment, we never stop to think that the moment will not be repeated as time is linear in only one direction.
My daughter Alexandra will never again be a baby and my youthful and beautiful Rosemary will not be alive again.
The album, and many of the other albums that we have, reveal that the world of the black dial phones was one in which putting together a family album was a necessary but pleasant obligation. I can imagine Rosemary telling me to print this picture or that and me snipping it to fit the page of the album.
Hilary and the Holt Renfrew Album 1977
This blog will survive my death as will the albums. How important is for me to save these album scans into this exterior hard drive labeled Family? Is it important?
But what will remain for me, at least, is the wonder and delight of those handwritten postcards and greeting cards sent by my mother and Rosemary’s family. And I wonder who it was that saved that Mexico City bus line ticket? There is that photograph of Rosemary holding Alexandra by the 1968 Mexico Olympic sign. Rosemary in those days called our daughter “our Olympic baby as she was born in August 1968.
There is a delight in seeing pictures, my mother’s writing and Rosemary’s writing on a tactile page.
But then it all happened when one had to answer the black dial phone.
