Close to Home by John McPherson for August 13, 2024

Don’t forget to tell about “airmail”.

Except they can’t read it because it’s in cursive.

And we had PEN PALS!

I couldn’t read it at night, so I invented fire!

2010 copyright too. Ugh!

“Say… let’s go over to Grandmas, and I’ll show you a phone that’s attached to the wall! It has a curly cord, and rotary dial… that’s this weird thing you would stick your fingers in and spin to make it work! She also has this thing called a Princess Phone! I’m tellin’ ya, it’s like the Smithsonian over there!”

Aww, no Bleeb today.

Does anybody remember receiving and sending ‘chain letters’ ?!?!?

Remember those birthday cards from Grandma with a dollar inside!

And we had to wait days for a response. Wait, that’s often true with e-mail and texts.

Like I tell the young guys at work, my letters were carved in stone tablets

Flag’s on the wrong end and the wrong side and it’s the wrong color. (Okay! I’m a mailman! I see these things!)

Oooooh I’m so excited…..☺️

These last generations don’t even know how to write in cursive. What a travesty!

Instead of a complete education, Common Core is dumbing down America!

And what is e-mail?

The cost of stamps may be putting a damper on frequent use of snail mail, especially since email gets there more quickly and it’s easy to add pictures.

And, the mailbox number is 24-7 AWESOME!

See kids, this is an email. Back in my day, we didn’t have texting

My baby, she wrote me a letter.

And long distance calls were really expensive, so we kept them to 30 seconds or less.

And the stuff it’s written on is called “paper.”

Actually, e-mail recently had its 50th anniversary. It’s been around since the early 70’s, and existed long before the “Internet”.

They are not impressed…..

♫ ’I gave a letter to Gmail

It showed up as ‘sent’

Bright early next morning

mailer daemon brought my letter back

(they wrote upon it)

Return to sender, address unknown, No such number, no such zone

mail Delivery Failure, mail Delivery Subsy

We had a quarrel, a lover’s spat

I write I’m sorry, but my letter keeps coming back’ ♪

Apologies to Elvis.

♫ We just got a letter! ♫ We just got a letter! ♫ ♫

Bleeb! Send me a postcard! :)

handwritten, no less, with a tool we called a “pen”!

Sorry you had it so rough back then.

And stamps were only 5 or 6 cents.

There was a time not so long ago when our phones weren’t smart.

No one sends email anymore, either.

I miss letter writing. These days it’s hard to strike up a correspondence, as no one is really interested in that sort of thing, but I love getting a letter. My niece and I used to write back and forth when she was younger, but now she is grown and living her life. I do correspond with an old friend via email, which is nice, but still, not quite the same.

They don’t have a clue and don’t care.

“See kids, this a PHONE, it’s attached to the WALL!”

This is what we did before they invented keyboards and touch screens.

Ancient text messages

At 73 cents a stamp now I can see why no one writes anymore

Now any random person can try to scam, stalk, insult or whatever to you.

And we were graded for PENMANSHIP in school!