There was a hangtag on the door one Tuesday, from Oncor, the electric guys, saying that our electricity would be off from 8:00 am until 3:00 pm on Wednesday. 
Okay. Priorities?
Get the car out of the garage. It’s true, I can unhook the door from the opener apparatus, it’s just easier to get the car out and close the garage door. Then, in and out of the house through the front door. Check.
Finish up with the computer and shut it down. Maybe I’m overreacting, but it just seems better if I turn it off rather than having the power go off. Check.
Then I went out to run errands. Back at home, I wandered around the house, trying to figure out what I could do.
Every time I walked into a room, I automatically flipped the switch.
I really needed to find a piece of orange card stock in my closet and had to go get a flashlight to locate it.
Everything I wanted to do, I couldn’t. Dirty clothes from working in the yard on Tuesday had to stay dirty. Okay. Some things need ironing. Oh, no, wait, can’t do that after all.
No microwaving. No running the dishwasher. No vacuuming. (Okay, I could have mopped and dusted and cleaned the bathroom. I didn’t.) Instead, I went to the room with the most windows and best light and read until time to go cut some daisies to put on the lunchtime table at West Avenue Elementary School for the Reading Club girls.
At Reading Club, (where the electricity was on), one girl (let’s keep on calling her “Meg”) was reading a page (from Dear Mr. Henshaw, published in 1984) and the story’s young man was deciding to make a long distance phone call, and he picked up the receiver and dialed. Which meant a conversation (akin to the one about mimeograph machines) about why making a long distance phone call was an issue and what exactly a “receiver” was.
“Nowadays,” I said, “I can call on my phone anywhere. But when I was your age, I could call anybody in Waco on the phone at our house, but if I wanted to talk to someone in a different town, it would be a long distance phone call, and it would cost extra. And the longer I talked, the more it would cost.”
“Do you know what telephones used to look like?” I went on, as I began that miming thing, where I try to explain things with gestures while I’m scrambling to think of the words I need to use. “There was a square sort of part, that sat on a table, and there was a dial on the top of it.”
“Oh, yeah,” said “Meg.” “In 101 Dalmatians, I think there’s a phone like that. And you had to …” and she began to mime dialing, but it wasn’t dialing, it was punching in numbers.
“Right,” I said (at least sort of right). “And the receiver was on top, and you had to pick it up and dial the number, and you talked into one end and you heard on the other end. There was a cord that attached the receiver to the phone, and a wire that attached the phone to the wall, so you couldn’t walk around and talk.”
“Meg” is thinking through all this, then said, “What did you do when you wanted to text?”
I needed a couple of seconds for my own composure. “Well, there wasn’t any such thing as texting,” I said. “It hadn’t been invented yet.”
And the look on her face could only be described as horror. Honestly. I could see in her eyes that she simply cannot fathom a world where there’s no texting. I feel that way about electricity.
Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
Galatians 6:9 (NIV)
We are taking much longer than I thought we would, slogging through this book. It’s because we keep having to stop so I can explain a word, an idea, a bit of the history of what things were like, back in the old, old 80’s, way before these girls were born. And they are patient, too, as I stop them sometimes three or four times a page. It’s important because they plow through, reading word after word, and are successful at getting to the bottom of a page, but they’ve not listened to what they’ve read. So we have to take a moment, or several moments, to talk about what’s happened in the story. And what’s a juke box, a pinball machine, mildew?
And I still need to really explain a rotary dial.
Ha ha! I accidentically read the word hangtag as “hashtag.” How fitting for the topic of your post!
I remember when you came to Mimi’s, when we’d decide to order a pizza, you’d always rush into her sewing room, yelling “I want to call! I want to call!” And we’d have to stand over you and say, “Make your finger go all the way around until it stops. Don’t take your finger out until it stops.”
I had a hard time getting past you’re taking cut flowers for the lunch table. You are amazing! Miss you.
They are so sweet and appreciative about every thing we do. It’s been a great year and we’re all sad the school year’s almost over.
A similar reaction to these kids…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkuirEweZvM
Do you remember teaching Natalie how to use Mimi’s old red rotary phone? And she always wanted to order pizza while they were there, so she could use that phone.