The Ringing Of A Long Distance Call In 1955 And Now

 I want to be your friend

For ever and ever

When the hills are all flat

and the rivers are all dry

When the trees blossom in winter

And the snow falls in summer

When heaven and earth mix

Not till then will I part from you

This is an old Chinese wedding poem, author unknown that many couples recite at their wedding ceremonies. My great niece and her husband recited this at their wedding in 2005 and I was very impressed with its meaning and I have quoted it in an article I wrote soon after the wedding. I described it and ascribed it to other things in my life and other lives with a meaning I derived that is true to me.Hills are not flat and rivers do not run dry and that shows that they will be friends for all eternity. Trees do not blossom in winter and snow does not fall in summer and so in our life, we hope it will be as long and prosperous until things could or would occur. We can attribute our feelings on most everything we love and adore to last as long as the poem mentions and we can only wish that this will be true.

I know a young couple who will be using this group of words to pronounce their love to one another in a few months at their wedding. I called it to their attention and since the bride-to-be is Asian, it is more than quite appropriate in her use of this poem in her wedding remarks to her groom and him to her.

However, many of us can use this in our own life and implement and apply the words to things happening to us right now.

My Mom was my best friend to the day she passed away on October 19, 1984. She was 77 and 5 months and it will be 29 years this coming October and I still miss her.  When something good happens to me, I want to go to the phone to tell her and I know she would be excited and happy for me and us.

When something not so great happens, I want to tell her too so she could comfort me as she did when I was a little girl. When I receive a nice present, I want to run over to her apartment to show it to her.

Even after 29 years, I still want to share with her the good and sometimes not so great things because she was my Mom and I was devoted to her and of course she was to me.

When my first grandson was born, I felt the urge to go to her apartment to take her to the hospital to see her second great grandchild. Of course, she was gone by then. It is interesting how you still can feel the presence of a departed one and you do not have to even look at their picture.

I remember when we went on our first cruise in 1969, she was there at my house taking care of my young kids and when I got to the stateroom on the ship, there was a beautiful orchid corsage waiting for me to wear for the evening dinners. How sweet and when we got to our first port, I was able to call her and talk to the kids and her and what a good feeling that was calling her in those days, no cell phones yet, from the cruise area aboard the ship and to hear their  voices. That was 44 years ago and things were different then with calling long distance as it was called.

When my brother and sister-in-law moved to Springfield, Illinois in about 1955, they would call us one Sunday and the next Sunday, they would call her folks and then the parents would call each other to relate that they were well and doing fine etc. We waited on our Sunday around 530 PM for the signal to let us know a long distance call was coming to us. The phone would ring a real long constant ring, then you did not pick it up, you waited and about three minutes later the phone rang normally and you knew it was the awaited call from a loved one.

Now days, we all walk around with our cell phones and press a button and we are talking anywhere in the world we desire.

Oh how times have changed and for the best and better with all these new current available wonderful toys we have to use and love.
 

When my first grandson was born almost 21 years ago, I got my first cell phone which we called then our car phone because it was hooked in your car permanently. You did not usually carry it in your purse or pocket. Then about a few months after I had it put in permanently, a friend showed me her cellphone and it was in her purse. When I saw that, I decided to have the one in the car taken out and then I got my one that we all carry around with us all of the time.

So times have changed, watches now come with batteries, no winding, some have no batteries, you just keep it in the light to keep it going when you do not wear it.  When we got a 19 inch TV, I thought us rich, many years ago I bought a 45 inch one and everyone thought we had won the lottery. Now I bought a 57 inch one a few years ago and now there are 80 inch ones.

As time travels and we are on our life journey, our dreams and desires widen and we are awakened to all the new instruments of life to make us happier, be more informed and to be quite with it and we have all these new contraptions that almost everyone else has too.

Our dreams become reality and reality becomes a pleasant way of life. When we bought our first video cassette recorder 31 years ago, I thought nothing could be finer than to be able to record a show and watch it later. In about 1968 or so, I hooked up an audio recorder to a light timer and programmed the timer to go on and somehow it turned on the recorder and the recorder  picked up the show that was running on the TV I had left on. When I returned, the TV was still on, the audio recorder had turned on and recorded the audio portion of the show and I could listen to the show I missed, my soap opera. It could only record about 45 minutes when the timer turned it on.

So you can see, I was ahead of my own time, being able to listen to a missed story. Genius for sure.

Times are easier, pleasanter and surely sweeter with all we have now.  Life’s journey leads us to completed dreams and assets of things we never thought there would ever be in our lifetime.

There is so much out there to enjoy what with instant pictures on our cell phone, instant everything that waiting for a long distance call every other Sunday seems mundane. It was not, it was pure joy to talk to our family in Illinois and even though life was simple then, we still enjoyed the little things we had as much as these gigantic things available now.

Life’s journey has taken a different road, but even the old roads were pretty awesome way back in the olden days of my youth. As the Chinese poem stated, “I will not part from you.”

Whether the old phone calls to the new cellphones, to the small TV sets to the gigantic ones, to hooked up audio recorders to a timer to recorders on the TV set, to photos taken instantly on our phones, all of this is part of our journey into life and to not parting from the ones we love by using these new inventions.