This morning I was painting furniture while talking to a childhood friend on the phone. I told her with the fair next week my column deadline was moved up, and I needed to check it off my list that day.
She began giving me ideas about things I could write about. This never works. It just must be a topic that catches my attention out of nowhere. So, we continued talking about growing up when she started telling me her CB name was Honey Bun and Nancy's was Snow White. At night they would call each other and change channels to find each other again. And then I said, "There is my column."
Growing up we had a phone that was connected to the wall in the kitchen and had a cord. Over time the cord would begin to split as we would stretch it over and over as far as it would go getting out of ear range to talk. But it stayed right there. In the 70's an unheard-of phenomenon hit the country. We now had CB radios. And not only truckers could communicate while riding down the road. How this worked, as kids, we had no idea. But our massive world shrank a tiny bit.
One night I was up in my bedroom playing with my turntable record player that had a built-in radio and connected microphone. I was singing away to The Carpenters when a man's voice came out of the speakers in a scratchy voice. I screamed bloody murder and shot down the stairs thinking somebody was in my room. My brother came up to see what had happened and we figured out somehow my radio was picking up a trucker on the highway up the hill. We were amazed, and it took a long while for me to turn it on again at night.
We were still in a time that was not many generations from the invention of the telephone. We still watched shows where people would pick up the phone and ask a person on the other line to connect them to a specific household. They didn't even dial a number. We still shared a party line with our great aunt and uncle up the hill by that highway.
The concept of being able to talk to people through a radio was fascinating. So, it was enjoyable to hear Amy re-enact the setting, "Breaker-Breaker Snow White, this is Honey Bun. Come in." and then "This is Snow White, over." And then they would change to a different channel. The CB was shortlived in that decade as cell phones began to replace the family rotary phone and satellites replaced the old-fashioned antennas that attached to the side of our houses like lightning rods and stuck out of our car hoods.
The other day I was pumping gas as I talked to a friend from the car phone speaker and watched a video clip on the pump about exercise and diet. I believe we have now left Honey Bun and Snow White in the dust. Over and Out.
It isn't really the advancement in communication that amazes me as much as it is the relentless urge to find ways to communicate. From two tin cans attached by a string, to messages in a bottle, to names carved on a tree, we naturally find ourselves drawn to ways to share news, spread gossip, spark a laugh, and ruminate over a memory. Two little girls snuggled in their room talking about the really important things little girls need to talk about when it is time to go to bed using disguised names is as funny as one little girl trying to figure out the magic of radio waves in her bedroom.
Our world had shrunk only a little bit but was spiraling fast. Social media, texting, emails, cell phones, Siri, Maps, satellite tv, even baby monitors and wireless speakers. It is endless but never as sweet as the memories of a more innocent time.
This is Tinkerbell, Over and Out.
