By Staff
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Shirley passed along a cartoon strip that is apropos to my column.
The grandmother is walking along with Wilson, the kid next door, saying, when she was young they didn't have computers, cable or cell phones.
Perplexed, Wilson asks, "What's a porch?"
Yes, we talked on front porches, in kitchens, in parlors and over backyard fences. We made time to talk!
Before television sets were common, my extended family gathered nearly every Friday evening for conversation.
This was always intergenerational - we kids were never sent off to play in another room.
We had dishpans full of popcorn, and often we were treated to orange pop.
While the grownups visited, they played games with us -"hide the thimble" and "button, button, who's got the button?"
Sometimes we gathered around the piano and sang while Aunt Helen played. I have many fond memories of spending time with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
My uncle Warren, the richest of all the uncles (he had a large farm and raised beef cattle), had a movie camera and 16 mm projector. Frequently we were treated to a movie night and watched some professional flicks of cartoons and animal movies, but our favorites were always those movies he took of us at family gatherings, picnics, and even mundane topics such as picking field corn.
We were always delighted when in the middle of the corn-picking movie he reversed the projector and the corn jumped from the picker into the air and back on the corn stalk.
Then it happened. One by one the individual families bought TV sets and the Friday evening get-togethers stopped.
Each family sat home, glued to the black and white sets.
We no longer played "hide the thimble." We didn't share dishpans full of popcorn.
The advent of computers and cell phones inarguably increased communication and cable TV has brought interesting and strange and distant worlds into our homes.
Still, these advances have not necessarily improved the quality of communication.
Speaking with a disembodied voice or e-mailing and instant messaging family, friends and business associates is wonderful, practical and even expedient, but it isn't very personal.
I still long for old-fashioned, face-to-face conversation.
Out on the porch I turn off the cell and cordless phones (answering machines handle any calls) and just sit.
Think. Talk with my family. Play with the grandkids. No TV. No computer. No video games. Just good, old-fashioned entertainment - talk! This is how I like to communicate.