Not easy keeping in touch
I heard the ring of my iPad. I grabbed it and opened the Messenger ap. Sure enough, my 8-year-old granddaughter was calling. She likes to send me her drawings and ask me to guess what the object might be. Other times we video chat. Her folks have her on a safe kid’s channel with lots of fun stuff available—like colorful hats, designs, and creating facial expressions.
Now that she is old enough, she can call on her own to video chat. She tells me what’s she’s been doing and often reads me her latest stories. We don’t get to her place as often as we used to. But with chat, she never seems that far away. I am thankful for the technology.
Makes me think about the pioneers who headed west. Parting from family was very difficult because no one knew if or when they might see each other again. Even with the Pony Express, letters didn’t always get through. When they did, they might take months or more to arrive.
The Pony Express speeded up the mail, but not as much as when train tracks across the country allowed mail to come and go across the country not only faster but also with more regularity and safety. It became a little easier for family to stay in touch.
The telegraph also became available but at a price. Still every new invention made communication easier. The telegraph morphed into the telephone and now friends, family and businesses could communicate very quickly.
But all this took time. I lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin in the mid and late fifties. We had a phone. By then most others around us also had phones. Early 1960s my dad took a church in eastern Wyoming. Some had phones, in towns, but our town was a small oil town, and we had no phone.
If I needed to contact Dad, I walked the mile and 1/2 up hill to the church where he had his office. Without cell or GPS, Dad visited ranchers way off the beaten track. Many ranchers used walkie-talkies. Not something we could afford. A year or so before we moved to Kansas, our town of Lance Creek, finally, got set up with phone service.
Still from mail and phones, it was still a long time before many homes had personal computers and even longer before cell phones came into general use. We bought Cassie a pay-as-you-go cell her senior year because she often traveled to North Platte on weekends as part of a ministry team.
That phone saved her life when her car slid off the road near Cozad during a snow storm. She called AAA and was the last car brought in before everything shut down. Cassie spent a couple days with others stranded until roads cleared and she could head back to college in Denver.
In Wyoming, we often received Scholastic flyers with all sorts of information and news. I read that one day we would not only hear the person on the other end of the phone call but also see them. Seemed pretty out there in the early sixties. Those first cell phones made calls and not much more. Now cell phones have become minicomputers.
We now also have tablets that fit in a purse and that often do the work of a laptop. How far we’ve come from the days of pioneer families who said goodbye, often forever to family and friends.
I hear my iPad ring and I smile. I don’t have to feel withdrawal from not seeing my granddaughter face-to-face. (Her younger brother also joins her at times when she calls.) For all the frustration of technology, I am so thankful my grandkids are only a call away.
© 2025 Carolyn R Scheidies
Published Kearney Hub 07/16/2025
Feel free to share