Voice-O-Graph

 I've been slowly going through some of the boxes of papers and photos from my parent's house.  In one of them I found a Voice-O-Graph my grandmother sent my mother while she was in graduate school in New Orleans. These were roughly 1 minute recordings, etched into a 78 rpm record. She made this one on the 86th floor of the Empire State building on a foggy February day. She tells my mother that she's not sure what to say, but loves her and misses her.

I hadn't heard my grandmother's voice in 50 years, a half-century. It was an extraordinary experience. I had been hearing it in my head as I've re-read her notes and cards to me. But it's not the same as the recording.

Yesterday, I video chatted with The Boy as he made dinner in his apartment near Large University and I made dinner in my kitchen. He is the same age my mother was when her mother recorded that message. I could listen to him talk about the algebra proof he'd done. (This is not your mother's algebra class, he was several minutes into the description before I latched onto a term I knew, like a shipwreck victim grasping at a floating crate. Abelian groups, I know what those are!) He could admire my homemade fettucine. My mother and my grandmother would have been amazed at this technology. And, I suspect, eager adopters.

All this flotsam, floating forward through the currents of the last century, tossed about in various moves. Tiny remnants of people I knew and didn't. It's made me wonder what my children and the generation that follows them will think of what I've saved. What fragments of my voice will I leave behind? How will I know what to say?