I had to change my cellphone service today because Verizon is raising their price by $20 a month. With the new sim card arriving, I quickly swapped things out then finished by calling the new provider and moving my phone number over.
It wasn't until much later that I realized the old provider's voicemail system had something pretty important: my mother's voice. It was a voicemail from around 2019, the year she died. Nothing major, just telling me she wrote a check to her grandson for his birthday (I kept her books). And now it was gone!
A dash to my PC and the external hard drive solved the panic. Some time ago, I must have downloaded it.
Then I remembered: I've got my grandmother's voice around here somewhere too and never moved it to a safe spot.
It was late at night on the editor's desk in the newsroom at the United Stations (formerly RKO) Radio Network, just off Times Square in Manhattan. It was the week right after Christmas and the news cycle was typically slow, so I did what I used to do fairly often. I called my grandmother (shown with my mother in 1985) in Massachusetts.
She was 91 then, the new year that was about to start -- 1986 -- would be her last; she died on my wife's birthday in September.
No doubt I was mindful that there wouldn't be many opportunities to visit when I called that night because I started the tape recorder that sat by the editor's desk, used to record newsmaker interviews.
We chatted about the usual things we'd chat about - the Red Sox and Bruins, and various health issues - and then she wished me a Happy New Year and I went back to what could loosely be classified as work.
I kept the large 10 inch reel of tape, having no idea what I would so with it, and lugged it around with me from New York, back to the Berkshires, and ultimately to two different homes in Minnesota. It sat on a shelf for 35 years, through a plethora of storage technology cassettes, floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, and USBs.
I always intended to use one of the few remaining reel-to-reel recorders before I retired at Minnesota Public Radio to dub it off, but never did.
A few years ago, I sent it out to a digital recording service.
Behold! My grandmother's voice.
I'd forgotten a number of her mannerisms until listening to it for the first time a few minutes ago. She'd often end a sentence with "I don't know", for example.
She and I went to a lot of baseball games at Fenway Park and until the day she died, she'd tell the story of the time the Indians (my team) beat the Red Sox and as people filed out I was yelling "We won! We won!" A grandmother puts up with that sort of stuff. And, besides, even Boston wouldn't pop a kid with his grandmother.
She was a wonderful woman and I was lucky to grow up in a house where my grandmother lived right next door.
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