Who is Pearl Snitman

When I was younger, I knew where all of my friends lived and I knew their phone numbers. I didn’t have a lot of friends so in that way the memorizing was pretty easy. There were people whose numbers I didn’t know, but we had a kind of kid phone tree when we needed a group for a ball game, so the ones I didn’t know, someone did. Like an early six degrees to Kevin Bacon. It worked.

 

Adults had to worry about proper addresses to mail Christmas cards and needed to find people’s homes when going for a visit. I didn’t mail cards, I would hand them to people. It worked.

Eventually, I became an adult and found a need for an address book for numbers and addresses of people I knew but didn’t know well enough to visit on a regular basis. Also, my memory started to deteriorate fairly quickly and phone numbers faded like fog in the sunshine. I had a tiny black book that fit in my wallet. It worked.

 

When Louise and I got together it seemed that we really needed a stand alone address book that had addresses, phone numbers, birthdays and anniversaries. We were adults that needed to send Christmas cards, birthday cards and once we moved out west, phone calls back home on a regular basis. We merged our address books and my little black book got put in a drawer with other antiquated pieces of “important” paper. The merger made sense and it worked.

I think we have gone through four or five address books in the decades we have been together. Sometimes the binding would fail and we would end up with an elastic band around the cover and a bunch of loose pages. Over the years, our friends and family would move and or change their phone numbers which would mean a new entry had to be made. Eventually, Bette Nesmith Graham invented white out; which made re writing numbers and addresses of our friends and family much easier. Bette was the mother of Michael Nesmith of “Monkeys” fame. Some friends drifted out of our lives and their names didn’t make the move to a new address book. Some just drifted away from the earth.

Now, we have addresses and contacts on the computer, the iPad and on our cell phones. Every time we get a new mobile phone, we have to transfer our “contacts” over and inevitably I will forget how to do it the easy way. A hard drive crash and or a lost/stolen phone could leave us in limbo with no friends and family, so being the dinosaurs that we are, a hard copy is still important to us.

 

We are once again in need of a replacement Address and phone book. Guess what? It seems that Address books are no longer a profitable item and most stores don’t even carry them. We went to five or six stores today looking for a good replacement without any success at all. There are really crappy dollar store address books. Very high end book stores carry leather bound books with hand made paper made in the mountains of Tibet by defrocked monks. We felt like Goldilocks today, either the books were too cheap or too expensive. The search will continue.

 

I suspect that we will find our “new” book at a second hand store and this November I will be writing the Christmas cards and will turn to Louise and ask “Who is Pearl Snitman?”