Not Hugging Grands
If it wasn’t for Face Time, I would be loonier than “normal”. When my family gathers inside my phone I feel a slight bit calmer in my bones. Then the younger grand says, “Papa, Grammy, come see me.”
I crack…after I hang up.
“Hang Up”. There’s a phrase that’s met its demise, or soon will, when the WWII baby boomers pass on. My daughters probably remember using our yellow kitchen wall phone with the extra long cord. They’d drag that cord, close the laundry room door for parental privacy, and communicate and compare their lives with similar beings. They would “hang up” that phone eventually. Their generation grew into cell phones gracefully and appreciatively.
I did not. Yet, I survived and our land-line is now an antique.
Speaking of Antiques…if you read my last post…
Mathilde Eiker wrote, Growing Into Authorship”. I will have to “Google Her” ( as opposed to Hang Up) because the antique magazine claims she wrote a detective novel or two. I wonder if they are still in print. A mystery, if you don’t hang up.
Her main theme challenges the widely acknowledged fact that writers are readers. She lists several titles that should be read if someone is to be known as a reader: Euripides to a textbook on crop rotation. She claims writers should grow into their authorship by reading far more widely than most. I do agree with her premise, “the more a writer knows, the less likely he/she (the slash added 77 years later) is to make mistakes.”
I have recently been stung by this wicked truth. In my own novel set in the 1920’s, my character used a quill instead of a fountain pen.
Mathilde scares me from her grave (an assumption), “I am an editor. After I find one discrepancy in a writer’s manuscript , I never feel quite confident about his work again. Writers can get details right.”
Ouch! There are mistakes in all my novels. The most infamous is the serving of she-crap soup.
Enough!
Eleanor Tatum 
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