Communication is better today

Snail mail (1967) vs. email (2012)    

 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance

 

            “Can it be that it was so simple then, or has time rewritten every line? If we had the chance to do it all again, would we? Could we?”

            Those are lines sung by Barbra Streisand in the movie ‘The Way We Were’. Every day, as I grow more and more ancient, I wonder about that. Would we do the same things we did back then, like in 2008 or even earlier? (That’s as far back as my memory goes and even then it’s spotty.)

            ‘The good old days’ is not a phrase I use often. After all, what would I do without email, the Internet, and those spring-loaded dog collars that are the only way I can possibly keep hold of the giant mongrel Kezman who lives here?

            The reason I started thinking along these lines was that I was recently talking to a hockey coach who said he had several young players and several who will graduate next June. He said it was a good mixture of the young and the old.

 “The old?” I thought to myself (which is my favourite way). “So age seventeen is old now?” I continued talking to myself, which they say is a sign you have money in the bank, which I do. Tonnes of it.

 

So I talked to a few students around that age about whether they felt old at their age.

            “Well, yeah,” said one. “I read in a book – on the Internet, Wikipedia actually – that sometimes even young people felt like ‘elder statesmen’. I’ve been a student for a dozen years now, which is a long time to be in one job. People nowadays have eight or ten careers in their lives because things are changing so fast. A computer program that was brand new five years ago is like ancient history now, like as old as you are.”

            He didn’t really say that last part. I put that in just to add some conflict to this otherwise uninspiring column.

            To him, the Beatles are part of ancient history as well, as are the Soviet Union, Brian Mulroney, and common sense – all gone before he was born. To me, ancient history is the 1950s when we children expected to be nuked any minute, World War II and certainly World War I, the days without computers in every house, and people who could remember the 19^th century.

            Probably the biggest change of all is today’s instant communication. It’s amazing. A university student in Vancouver can send a text message to his dad at 2:00 pm and say he desperately needs money for a vital set of books (beer) and the dad can email or otherwise electronically transfer that money to him by 2:05 pm.

Here’s what it was like when I was attempting to attend post-secondary school in the late 1960s:

            Attending UNB Fredericton, I needed fifty dollars for two geology books. I had three cents in my bank account and my father had no phone. I phoned the neighbours who had just had installed the first phone on our road in Tilley and asked them to get father to mail me $50 in cash.

 

          Four days later no money. I phoned the neighbours again (Don’t ask me how I, with three cents, managed two long-distance calls from phone booths – remember them? - because it wasn't strictly ethical) and they said he didn’t have my mailing address, so he had to drive to Woodland, Maine (near Caribou) to ask my aunt for the address. She wasn’t home, so he drove to Grand Falls to see my other aunt who gave him the address.

            He had sent the money four days earlier. Right after I had hung up that second phone call, I went to the mailbox of my rooming house. Sure enough, my face lit up to find an envelope with the return address Tilley on it. Good old Dad! I knew he would come through.

 

             I quickly tore it open to find nothing but a single sheet of writing paper. “Dear son, I had five 10-dollar bills ready to put in this envelope and then by mistake I sealed it. I am very sorry and will try and send it by next weekend if I can find your address again. When I put it on the envelope, it was the only place I wrote it down. I’ll have to drive to Grand Falls again to get it, but I don’t have any money for gas right now.

            “Wait a minute,” he continued. “I just found five 10-dollar bills in my pocket!” Just about then I was in despair, but since I had just gotten paid $60 for working part-time in a small grocery store, I decided to use that money instead of the cash good old Dad would have sent if he hadn’t sealed the envelope already.

 

             Since the Riverview Arms tavern (long since demolished) was a good spot to buy secondhand books, I decided to go there for a while. I woke up a week later in Campbell River, BC.

                                       -end-