These days, we just don’t live close to family. I have always lived a transient life, if you will. Living in a military family as a child, I traveled around the country a lot; as an adult, I’ve continued the movement. And all of it has given me experiences that I am grateful for. I’ve loved my brothers in Philadelphia, gotten sand in my toes in Virginia, said “aloha” in Hawaii, eaten crabs from the Chesapeake, seen the gardens of New Jersey (there actually are some!), felt the heat of the Sonoran desert, and seen the horses race in the Bluegrass. And those are just the places I’ve lived – so many more I have visited. But all these stops have taken me to places where my family is not.
With all of this movement, communication has been an ongoing challenge in our family, both when I was growing up, and still today. I remember when I was a kid, some of my family used to mail around a cassette tape. On it were messages that family members would record, where we would talk about what was going on in our lives. I’m not sure who started this tradition, but it went on for a while before it eventually faded out. I remember hearing tapes of my grandparents talking about vacations or whatnot, and then I’d have to record something about what I was doing and send it back. It was a different way of communicating back then – different than just writing letters. I liked hearing the tapes, but hated making my recordings. I suppose I thought my own events were just not that exciting and I could never think of anything to say. I also didn’t care for the way I sounded on tape, so I tried to keep my recordings short. And of course, back then, I didn’t “get” why were making all these tapes.
Also back then, I remember my mom working on MRS VY: a family newsletter that we circulated around every so often. The name was created out of the initials from the families involved with the newsletter: M (McCaughey) R (Rowan) S (Smith) V (Vizy) Y (Youngquist). People would write in their contributions, which would be put into the newsletter, and then the newsletter would get sent out. I can so clearly remember the old lady that my Mom had drawn to represent MRS VY (Mom, do you still have that drawing?) But the newsletter, too, died out.
Then came the dawn of the Internet and my brother introduced me to email in the early 90’s. Email was so different back then. We used PINE or some program like that to open our mail and send messages back and forth. It was a very crude system, but fun and instantaneous. As email became more pervasive, my parents got on and I could email them instead of writing letters. Soon many more in the family joined in email and we had a quick and easy way to communicate that didn’t involved the cost of long-distance calls or the slowness of US mail. I was able to “talk” to my parents about college stuff and connect with my cousins who were also in college. While I always have kept in touch with my parents, I’m not sure I would have connected with my cousins if it weren’t for email.
Then, around the mid 1990’s, I started playing around on the WWW (who says “World Wide Web” anymore?) I discovered HTML and how to create web pages. I quickly got into building web pages like everyone else, with silly graphics (remember the BLINK tag?) and links to my friends web pages. But soon I discovered that I could use the web pages for communication (wow! I know!). So I reincarnated our old family newsletter into a family website called MRS EVHOY (now with the
Ellis,
Hesler, and
Orsetti families) where everyone could send (through email) their updates and I would post them to the website. Soon I was reconnecting with aunts and uncles that I’m sure I would have not heard from otherwise. Alas, this too faded out over time, but was fun in its heyday.
Then I had kids. Everything changed in so many ways when I had kids – but especially with communication. I thought back to why Granny and Pop-Pop used to send around those tapes when I was a kid - because I’m sure it was so they could hear my voice and know how I was doing. So when I had kids, I wanted to make sure that their grandparents (and the rest of the family) were very much able to know all about them. Because time is fleeting and I don’t want a moment to go by and have my children’s childhood missed. Yeah, yeah, it’s boring to everyone else, but not to me. (That’s also why I take a thousand pictures of them. Because I can never go back to when they are 1 or 2 or 3 and take those pictures again – so better take them now!)
Anyway, so when the kids arrived, we armed ourselves with a digital camera and a website – determined to document our thoughts and events with our children, so that our family (who is so far away) can know them as if they were here in our house, and see them as they change every day. We took tons of pictures and posted them on our website (
www.orsetti.com), and tried to email all the funny and interesting stories to everyone I thought might want to hear about them: my parents, Damon’s mom, friends, other relatives…. I became swamped with emails and I could not remember who I wrote what about. It became overwhelming.
Then I discovered the blog. Writing the blog has become a self-serve sort of way for anyone who wants to know about us and the kids to come and read about our lives. We try to share as much as we think the family and friends would like to know about, and also as much as the kids would like to one day read about. Because while I’m doing it for the family now, I’m doing it as an exercise for the kids later. I thought it would be nice for them to one day read about what vacations they took, what they dressed up for Halloween, how much their parent’s stressed over moving them to a new daycare, etc. (It should also help them a great deal when they are in therapy. I hope they get a discount from their therapist from all this documentation!!!)
But Damon recently mused about how some things, like blogs, can take away a certain amount of those conversations that one might have if the blog was not there. And it was striking that he wrote that, because just recently I had a conversation with someone mirroring that thought: I was visiting with some friends recently and they were asking me if our family was going to go on vacation this summer, and almost incredulously I said “Uh, no, we just got back from Canada. Didn’t you read it on our blog?” to which they replied, “But if we read it on your blog, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about.” Indeed, that is a good point, and most certainly what Damon is getting at. But I also think that “blog-talk” if you will (Hey I said it first! I call copyright!) can allow people to know more about you and lead to even more conversations, and I don’t think they take away from conversations you could have had. See the thing about blogging is that while I take a lot of time to write about what is going on, if you don’t read it, you are left behind. And trying to get you caught up most likely will never happen. Look, I’m not looking for the world to read my blog, but I'm just not going to rehash everything I’ve written the next time we talk. Because more than likely the next time we see each other, we’ll have other things to talk about. This is exactly what happens with someone that I’d really like to read my blog. I’ll say “Come read the blog! You are welcome to know us and all that we are doing!” but alas he never reads it. My emails to him include links to the blog, but he still never visits. I feel like we are living and sharing our lives, but he is too busy to read about it. And you would think that because he hasn’t read about what we are doing on the blog that we have all the more to talk about. Quite the contrary, we chit chat about this and that, but most of the “interesting things” (that I have blogged about) seems so out of context or so irrelevant when we are talking that I feel awkward telling him about them, so in the end our conversations leave me feeling: You don’t know what’s going on in my life, do you? And it’s all just right there - on my blog!
And in the past year that I have been on Facebook, I have found some dear old friends (Hi Jos! Hi Terri!) that I thought I might never get back in touch with again, and having moved places and moved jobs I’ve also been able to reconnect with friends and past co-workers that I also thought were well lost to the movement abyss. And even more recently, my family has been getting on Facebook. Right now I am “friends” with 10 family members (Hi Kevin, Kyle, Bobby, Vicky, Sarah, Ted, Thor, Jason, Jamie, and Susan!), and counting. If I wasn’t on Facebook, I’m sure I would not be in frequent contact with these people, just because of the sheer fact that trying to email 3 or 5 or 10 or 20 family members (as anyone knows ) is a lot to keep up with. Sure, there is a certain voyeuristic component to it – and I’m not sure what I’d think about running into someone who said “Oh I saw you on Facebook the other day” – but it is an interesting angle to think about. But the benefits of keeping in touch outweigh the weirdness (I think).
But anyways, blogs (and Facebook) have become such an important way for us to share with our family and friends what is going on in our lives, just as the circulated tapes and the once viable MRS VY/MRS EVOY. There will always be ways to communicate with family and friends, and just as everything else mutates or dies out, I wonder what will be the future of blogs and Facebook. Meanwhile, I’ll share all I have on the blog, because when I see you later I'll have something else to tell you.
