When You Move Away

   It is well over five years ago that I left Pittsburgh for Mexico City to live with the Salazar family—consisting of my daughter, Ellie, who has been living in Mexico for well over a quarter of a century with her husband, Miguel. It’s been a remarkably smooth transition for me and I hope that it is not sheer insensitivity or self-deception that I don’t sense a notable strain in the Salazar family. The two grandchildren are now both off in college in the US, but we remain in touch via email and phone.
   But not surprisingly, I feel that my connection with friends and relatives in the North is fading. I remain in touch with some of my cousins, though not with all, and with a slowly decreasing number of friends. Email is the savior in all the successful cases; it would never happen if our connectedness depended on the telephone—in small part because of the fees, but mostly because it is invasive. If, in these days, staying in touch depended on writing and posting letters, forget about it.

    Still, the current situation is more favorable to continuing communication than the past has been, although there is clearly also a loss. To put it somewhat glibly: quality has to a degree yielded to quantity: most of us are in communication with more  people than our parents were and probably less intensively so than were our forebears. More thought went into handwritten or typed letters than tends to go into emails.