Vintage Communication

“I was in Lowy, a small village in the east of the country which had been home to my ancestors many generations back—until finally my great grandfather, who had worked there as a school teacher, moved away with his wife and two children (one of them being my paternal grandfather).  It was sometime in the late 1930s that they moved to the elegant Calvinist town of Krest, not far from Lowy.  Other family—including my great grandfather’s six siblings and about three dozen cousins—remained, with many of their descendants continuing to live there to this day.

Lowy tends to impress upon me something about our contemporary society […]: that we do many things.  The fact is that when in Lowy, I do very few.  Admiring this photo was one.

It was a photo which I had not seen before—of my grandfather, his older brother and their parents, taken in the mid-1930s.  As I could tell from the logotype on the back, it had been taken in one of the major cities in the east of the country—these days maybe an hour’s drive from Lowy on the motorway.  In the ‘30s, taking the journey not owning a car, as the family surely did not, would have meant combining an extensive walk with a long train ride—I do not know how long.  They would likely have spent the day in town, and probably stayed the night.  And, judging from the clothes on the children, it does not seem like they would have casually popped into the photographer’s studio.  It must have been (part of) their reason for going.

The back of the photo also gives some explanation as to (one of) the possible motivations for having it taken.  It was printed on a postcard, on which my great grandfather had written a short, affectionate message to a distant cousin who was then living in the capital.  Apparently, back then, this was how they would send each other photos.

[…]

My family, had they harnessed mobile technology to send the photo and short message, would have arguably made much less of the experience.  For one thing, I would never have learnt of their kind gesture some 80 years later; but, that aside, it is unnecessary to compare the different layers of emotions brought on by receiving a personal photo-post-card with a few hand-written lines in the snail mail, to that of receiving the same information through Messenger.  (Whether my grandfather would have enjoyed parading around town for a day in what looks like little girls’ clothes, to please a distant relative, may be a more mysterious question, albeit the blank look on baby granddad’s face does reveal a possible answer.)

[…]

Musing over this, I realized why I enjoyed writing messages on my grandfather’s vintage Erika typewriter.  Not simply because I thought it was worth the tendinitis that the neatly-disorderly script it produces is so easy on the eye

(Appallingly, it does not.)

The reason I am so fond of typing with the Erika is the same reason why I am impressed by the messaging […] as done by my late relatives.  I am drawn to them not by the efficiency or beauty of their medium, but by their earnest, playful or heroic ways of overcoming its inefficiency.”