Keeping in touch

 

One of the lasting legacies of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the rise of Zoom and other video chat platforms. During the shutdown, we conducted business and networking on Zoom, but we also started to use it for social contact.  I began to use the platform to keep in touch with my far-flung family and friends, some of whom are not on Facebook or other Social Media. I started something called the UK Family Chat, to connect with my family in England, Scotland and on the West Coast. At first, during the worst of the shutdowns, we met every couple of weeks. It was a small glimmer of sanity and connection amid the isolation. My sister and her daughters (one also in England and one in Scotland) were not able to visit each other so Zoom made a change from phone calls. The same went for my son on the West Coast and my daughter just a few miles away. Now that things have opened up and we have our lives back, the chats are far less frequent but we are still doing them from time to time. We talk for as long as we like; it's a far cry from 45 years ago, when I first moved to the US!  

When I married my American husband and moved with him to California, we paid for a telephone to be installed at my mother's home in England. Yes, in 1977, not everyone had a home phone in the UK-I grew up without one. When my fiancé proposed to me over the phone, he had to call me at work. I took the call by arrangement, on the public phone where personal calls had to be taken at the bank where I worked. Only the bank officers had their own extensions. Once I moved to California, with it's 8 hour time difference, I used to call my mother once a month at about 3am my time, because the rates were cheaper ($1 per minute!) and I would set a timer for 10 minutes. The rest of our contact was by letter, which were much more reliable than they are today. I could mail an airmail letter to England and it would get there in 3 days. Now, if it arrives at all, it's more like 3 weeks! I still have some of those letters; a precious reminder of my mother who passed away in 2014.

Letters have played an important part in my destiny, because I married my pen-pal!  In the mid 1970s, when I was starting work at a bank in Stevenage, England, my father's cousin visited us from California as part of a trip to "look up the English relatives." I asked her if she could find me a pen-pal and Rick was nominated as "the only one of her son's friends respectable enough to write to her little English cousin"!! He was working his way through college at the time and we exchanged weekly letters for about 18 months before I went to California to visit my relative. The rest, as they say, is history!  We married in 1977, in England, and I moved to the USA.  

This afternoon, another Zoom chat will take place; my daughter plans to join us from Florida, where she is on vacation, just to give us all beach envy. Next week, I have a Zoom call arranged with an old High School friend. A few weeks ago, when bad weather made driving unwise, we switched a church meeting to Zoom. I sometimes meet with clients virtually to show them pictures from their photography sessions. It has become a part of life. The shift of so many things to online is a mixed blessing; I am fortunate to have a reasonably good internet connection and computer access. That is not the case with all sectors of the population. And, yes, nothing can beat human contact. But when human contact is not an option, as with my far-flung family, I'll take Zoom!