IPhones, Birthday Parties, Three Shorts And A Long

Dear Byron,

We did it! We all got together to celebrate your first birthday. Mommy and Daddy invited a bunch of their friends and their kids. We ate hamburgers and bratwurst. We sang "Happy Birthday" to you and we each enjoyed a piece of your cake.

Speaking of cake, you had a great time messing with it. You got it all over your face and hands. It was a good thing Mommy put that bib on otherwise you soon would have had it all over your shirt as well.

Here's a picture of you with Mommy, Daddy, your two sets of grand parents, with GGMa and me on the left.

By the way, I took the picture with my iPhone. When I got home I finished up your first year book. As you'll soon learn, Apple has an application that enabled me to choose from all those pictures we took this first year and turn it into a memory book. It should be waiting for you when you arrive at our house. I sent it off by email yesterday. They wrote back at once to tell me it will be completed in less than a week.

One more thing. When GGMa and I got home the Monday after the big weekend, we went to a banquet sponsored by Pregnancy Assistance Center North. That's an organization near us that helps young parents who find they're not ready to raise a little baby like you were only a year ago. Anyway, at the banquet I won a drawing for an iPad! Yup, me. I won it and now I have another gadget. This is getting ridiculous. I can take photos with the iPad too.

All that goes to remind me again of how things have changed since I was your age way, way back in the 1930s. Sure we had cameras and radios and cars, but nothing like what you will grow up with, nothing at all. We certainly did not have anything even remotely like my iPhone, the gadget that is also called a smart phone, because it is also a computer in my pocket. And nobody even thought about an iPad or a computer and all the other stuff that's so common now.

Let me tell you about the telephone we had on our farm. It hung on the kitchen wall and looked just like this.

When we wanted to make a phone call we had two choices. We could either make the bells up on top ring by turning the handle on the right or we could click that holder on the left up and down a couple times until we got the telephone operator. Let me explain.

There were actually a bunch of people on our phone line. We knew somebody wanted to talk with us if we heard the bells ring in a certain way. Our ring was three shorts and a long. In other words, if somebody turned that handle on the right to make three short rings and then kept turning and turning it to make one long ring, we knew they wanted to talk with us. All we had to do was pick up that earpiece on the left and talk into that round mouthpiece in the middle.

Of course, any one of the people on the ten or so other farms could listen in or even join in the conversation of they wanted to. It was what they called a party line. It was a little like setting up a multiple party conversation today—sort of.

Things will keep on changing as you grow up, Byron. That's the nature of technology. I can only hope and pray that when you are an adult lots of folks will use these discoveries to help and bless others rather than hurt and destroy.

For now, those concerns are a long way into the future for you. Meanwhile, we all look forward to a good time laughing, telling stories and eating cake at your next birthday party.

Love you,

GGPa