Clermont

When you’re all coming from different parts of time whether past or present, sometimes finding a common ground is the best way to relate.

Today, Courtnee and I witnessed it first hand at the Summerville at Oak Park. There we saw what it was like to have the past together with the present.

Here’s what we mean.

We were in a room full of ladies–ages 99 to 18. And when you’re in a room with that many women, chatter and laughter is about the only thing you will hear so much so that the echoes of our good conversation spilled into the hallway.

The topic of conversation: What it was like then and what it is like now.

The dominators of the conversation were three women all over the age of 85. They reminisced about the first pieces of technology they had so long ago and what it was like to grow up during the Great Depression.

The eager ears listening were two young teenagers from a local high school, both of whom chuckled and gasped at the stories of cranking up a car to go to school and paying 10-cents to see a movie.

While the conversation itself was captivating, the real story was the one not being told or being spoken about.

The young girls hardly ever, if not ever, picked up their cell phones or iPods to drown out these stories of the past. They were “unplugged” from the world and didn’t care—just enthralled by the mere concept of face-to-face communication with someone who was alive during a time they had only read about in their history books.

And that was the common ground: face-to-face communication. There was no need to understand the differences in technology that each grew up with. No need to understand the differences between a Victrola or an iPod.

Even though our mission and objective with this project is to focus on youth and technology and how it is changing their lives, perhaps sometimes, it’s not always like that. Maybe just maybe, the art of face-to-face communication isn’t dying, it’s just being preserved in little pockets of the world.

We found one of those pockets today, and it was an experience that I will always look back to, especially when I start to feel that it is slowly slipping away.

-Racquel