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?”
