Well, a little background. My maternal grandmother has been writing newspaper articles for years now - mostly “I remember when” kind of things about growing up in western Massachusetts. Last week I received an article about her first experience with radio back in the 1920s - an uncle had brought her grandparents a receiver. As it was coming up on the 10th anniversary of my grandfather’s death, I got kind of pensive thinking about them both and this came out:
My grandmother tells of the time when radio first came to her, a small box of wires and crystal planted on the table in her grandfather’s house. The voices, she said, were faint and indistinct, coming across from what may have been Boston or New York but what could have been half the world away for all that it mattered. I can see her family now: brothers, parents, grandparents all hunched around the bristly box, taking turns with the earphones, listening for the sound of a man casting his voice across the Berkshires in the hopes that people like my ancestors were out there, eager to hear him speak as he was eager to speak to people he could not see and would never meet. The sound would fade out, replaced by the cold voice of Nature’s electromagentic hiss, and the set would be turned off. The man would continue speaking until he grew tired and shut the transmitter down, unaware that someone had stopped listening.
hmmm… when I hear faint indisticnt voices, they up my olanzapine doseage.
nice though, can’t think of anything I’d improve in it. Well written.
Demo
April 30, 2001, 2:57pm
4
That’s great, man. Short, poignant and you weren’t excessive on sentiment or description, like many people are.
Make’s me think of what I will tell my grandkids about the internet.
