Long Distance Phone Calls

The other day I called a friend I haven’t spoken to is probably a couple of years. We email a fair amount, but haven’t actually seen each other in about 4 years and haven’t conversed in one or two years. And I said how silly that is, but it showed my generation gap, that to phone her (all the way down in New Jersey) is a long distance call. Yes, of course I have a plan that covers all my calls, and I should make more of them because the plan is geared to my spring hiring call volume that used to cost several hundred dollars a month. But to pick up the phone and call someone – nope, it’s ‘long distance’. It’s also one more thing that email has done for us, because it’s so much easier since I’m at the computer anyway, to dash off a message or forward a joke, because then the person can read and respond at their convenience.
Gee it was nice to hear her voice and visit and gossip for a while. To actually talk to her. Made me wonder why I waited so long to do it, and why I don't do it more often with more people.
I remember having a fight with my father (well, ok, I remember having several fights with my father) about a long distance call. We used to take the cows to shows, and once, I must have been about maybe 11 or 12 or so, we were not sure of the date of one. It then became my responsibility to have known the date, I’m not sure why except it was the Capital District Guernsey Show and I was the one who had the Guernsey cows in the herd (nope, not sure why that was, either). So my father told me to call another farmer who might know when it was. I looked up the number, dialed (remember dialing, not punching buttons?) and somehow got the wrong party. Who of course did not know when this show was. When I hung up, my father said ‘you wasted a call to Philmont’ – now Philmont is about two towns away and maybe the charge would have been a quarter but back then even a quarter was an amount not to waste.
So even now, 55 or so years later, I hesitate to make a long distance call. And we shouldn’t – we should hear the voices of our friends more often. So I am going to try to resolve to call people more. Let’s see what happens.
Oh, p.s., we did somehow find out when the cow show was and go to it and bring home a few ribbons. But cow shows are another story.