When I was growing up our phone number was 79 M,  and the city 15 miles away was "long distance." 

And that's what my mother whispered, as if on stage, doing an aside.  "Long distance," she would say.  "Don't forget you're talking long distance.  This is a long distance call, you know.  Your father will die of prostration if we have long distance calls on the phone bill!  Long distance.  Your call is long distance!"

In those days, phone reception was a little fuzzy anyway.  Add my mother to the frenzy, and there really wasn't much sense in risking a 15-cent toll call.  It was easier to send a letter.  (What were stamps then?  About three cents?)

So my parents were letter-writers.  Mostly they wrote to their parents.  And their parents wrote back.  When my sister was born, I remember a letter from Granny (Mother's mother).  It said, "Four and no more."

Shortly after that, my father took off a Friday afternoon and spent the weekend with an ice-pack in his lap.  And he didn't want any "damn kid bugging the hell" out of him, even though bugging the hell out of him was pretty much where we excelled.  

I even heard him mutter, "None of them even look like me," which unfortunately was not true. I looked a lot like him.  And Gene, even at three years old, looked just like Daddy's father, possibly the person from whom my father had learned his communication skills.  "Shut the damned door.  Were you raised in a barn?"

It seemed an odd question for him to ask.

Anyway,  Daddy rarely used the phone.  He didn't even call the relatives in Texas to let them know we would be coming for a month-long visit in the summer.  And from the looks on their faces, I'm pretty sure he didn't write letters ahead of time either.

We spent most of the vacation with Uncle Quincy and Aunt Irma in Dallas.  They didn't have children, and I'm pretty sure it was because they didn't want any.  But they were wonderfully gracious in housing, feeding and entertaining us.  Uncle Quincy wasn't a drinking man, but he did put in long days at work while we were there.

The only "moving pictures" we have of our family are thanks to Quincy and Irma.  Gene had blond hair and blue eyes then.  The movies show Mother and Daddy as young, healthy, and hardworking people, up to their eyeballs with raising kids. 

 In fact, my parents in those photos are younger than my daughter is now.  It was a very different world.  No cell phones -- not that Daddy would have used one.  I would like to hear his voice again, even if it were just,"Get the hell outa the way.  Can't you see I'm trying to watch the Friday Night Fights?"

But I do have my brother Gene who takes his son to Wrestle Mania, or some such thing.  And Gene rants and raves quite a bit like Daddy, except when Gene rants and raves in writing, he speaks with a Korean accent.  Daddy must be shaking his head, saying, "Who the hell would of thunk it?"