How we used to find people

I have been sorting and organizing the piles in my sewing room.  In the last week I’ve uncovered about 20 years of quilting magazines that I could never bear throwing away.  I’m not a clutter-free sort of person, I’m a keeper and saver.  I tell my kids that living in Third World countries for several years qualifies me to be like a Depression Era survivor.  I do not throw things away if they still might be useful.

So, this week I went through 20 years of magazines, page by page, project by project and I actually tore out the patterns and ideas I wanted to keep and I filed them by topic in sheep protectors in binders.  It just about killed me to compromise an intact magazine like that, but I had to let go of them to make room for other things.   I am donating 4 large boxes of mint condition magazines (minus a few pages here and there) to the book sale next month at our quilt guild.  I’m feeling pretty good about the shelf space this will buy in my sewing room.

While I was uncovering piles of magazines, I happened across this old 2005 telephone book.  Wow.  I haven’t seen one of those in several years.  It took me back.

I looked through the pages, remembering life as it used to be before we all carried cell phones wherever we went.  We got our information from phone books.  We had phone books in drawers by the phones in our homes, and we looked at them almost every day to find the phone numbers of neighbors and friends,  to find businesses and services in the yellow pages, and to find information about our local and state and federal government officials.We used phone books to look up zip codes to know where to send letters.  We used phone books before GPS systems were even imagined to find our way.The back half of each phone book was printed on yellow paper.  The Yellow Pages.  This was where we found the phone numbers and ads for businesses and services.  The listings were grouped alphabetically by topic.The white pages at the front had all the names, addresses and phone numbers of normal people, like us.Here we are in 2005 at 24 West 500 South with a phone number of 801 224-9355.  We used that number for about 20 years, discontinuing our land line when we moved to Washington 3 years ago.  Very few people have a land line these days.  It’s becoming a thing of the past.  Today we have cell phones that connect us to a digital world.

I no longer subscribe to quilt magazines printed on paper.  I see them at the checkout stands in stores, so I know they still print them, but when I want to search for quilting ideas, or fabric, I can go directly to quilt sites or internet sites like Pinterest right  in my phone and on my computer.  It’s all at my fingertips.

Our world has changed.  Quite drastically, I’d say.