Telephone Book Club

    Have you ever read a telephone book? There it sat, a permanent fixture on the counter in front of the clock radio, when I was little, wispy pages wrinkled and edge-torn by the time next year’s version was released. White pages at one end, yellow at the other, and a skinny blue section filled with public service information such as call before you dig, emergency phone numbers and standard first aid. All the phone numbers with the prefix (579) fit on only a few columns. Our community was so tiny we knew every family within. But today I’m writing about a different telephone book.

    The escalation of this Covid business means spending time in remote areas is for the fool hearty, risk takers, or those with no other option. The Covid virus has been taking its toll in our rural communities in more ways than we care to think about, making it harder to connect with loved ones living in special areas. A couple of months back, Mom, a senior over 80 years old, ended up in hospital for three weeks. She needed significant care on return to her condo, lest she be forced to transition to an assisted living situation. My siblings and I stayed night and day for 6 weeks until her confidence returned to be on her own again. We too needed to return to our daily routines. I was looking for a way to spend time together, but apart, especially the first few nights alone. I remembered an idea I had from the past but had never taken up and now seemed like a good time to take it for a drive—the telephone book club, for two. 

    I learned of this idea a few years back while living in Lethbridge with an elderly room mate, Dorine, who is vision impaired. I walked to work every day at the public library. Every night after dinner, Dorine would slip into the sitting room for a phone call from Atlanta, Georgia, from her son. They read a book together over the phone lines and I thought, what a good idea, and tucked it away. Now I’m doing the same thing. Every day Mom and I call in the morning and ask, do we want to read that night? If so, we set a time. In the evening, then I read to her for 15-30 minutes from a work of fiction. What happens during that time?  I feel close even though we are miles apart, Mom has my undivided attention for a full 30 minutes. I learn things about her that I never knew when we talk about the story and she helps me with vocabulary. It’s a moment of tenderness between mother and daughter who much of the time have diverse tastes and interests. It builds trust every day when we show up for the story. It can be hard to talk about such strong feelings as love and worry, but we know it when we feel close. Mom looks forward to hearing what happens. We get to know each other through story, a welcome activity, so needed at a time when other areas of life seem less hopeful. 

    Our telephone book is “The Pull of the Stars,” by Canadian author, Emma Donoghue. Set in a maternity ward in a hospital in 1918 during the flu epidemic and WWI, it is full of death, delirium, and highly relevant today. Language style and specifics from history give the opportunity to test each other on bits of trivia we can look up during the day on the Internet. I have the opportunity to put myself in the shoes of pregnant women from historical Ireland, who may have been my grandparents or great grandparents, and to vicariously share of that experience with women ancestors I will never know personally. I hope this story encourages you to try it, if you have a loved one from whom you are isolated. Ask them to read a telephone book with you! Set a date and time, find a good story, and get reading. 

Pull of the Stars

Digitize a cassette tape with your husband’s gear

On January 1, 1976, my sister recorded cassette tapes of our grandmother talking. We never understood much of Grandma’s language. She came to an isolated farm in Alberta in 1934 from Poland. She rarely left the farm, and never learned to speak English, or to read or write in any language. She spoke a mixture of her mother-tongue, which we assume was a dialect of Polish, splattered with a few English words. In my memory, her voice was powerful and entertaining, and I always hoped that one day I would understand more than instructions and farm chores; that I would know the deepest reaches of her thoughts and feelings.

My sister always said she had the tapes, but I’d never seen them. So when, one day, she showed up with a tape recorder and two tapes in tow, I was very happy. She asked me to make a copy. Having such unique recordings is a treasure. As the cassettes are now over 40 years old, their quality is deteriorating. I want to preserve them and use them, to listen to them, and translate what my grandmother was saying.

I decided to make a learning project out of preserving the content of the tapes, and to share the process here in case others with old cassettes stuck away somewhere and can learn from my experience. Who knows where a project like this could lead?

April 7, 2018 __Session 1 details:

Get help!

I enlisted the help of my husband. He has recording equipment and experience. Although he had never done this kind of project before, he came to my rescue.

Use a practice cassette first

If you’re not sure, get professional assistance.

Gather the equipment

·      cassette player: you need a working cassette player with a line out

·      audio interface (we used a Scarlett 18i8). This piece of equipment allows the analogue signal to be adjusted and converted to a digital signal as it is transferred to a computer

·      digital audio workstation software (DAW) (we used Cubase for this project)

·      cords, computer, speakers, headphones, blank cd’s, practice cassette and screwdrivers

Troubles with tapes and tape decks

Tip 1:  Don’t throw away a working tape deck – your neighbour might need it one day. We tried four decks before we found one that was in good working order!

Tip 2: You don’t need to start listening at the beginning of the cassette, start anywhere. The more you rewind and fast-forward, the more you risk snapping the tape. Be careful about rewinding, especially right at the beginning or fast forwarding right to the end. If the tape breaks and slips away from reach, you might have to take the cassette apart to rethread it. 

Tip 3: If your tape breaks and you can see both ends, you can splice it with scotch tape. If your tape breaks and you can’t find the ends, you may have to open the case to join the ends and transfer it to another cassette if the cassette gets broken. Not all cassettes have screws, which was our problem. In that event, you may have to pry the body open with a screwdriver, being careful not to damage the tape, and transfer the tape to a new cassette frame. I know all this because it happened!

Tip 4: Practice the transfer with a blank tape before you use the good one. I can't stress this enough! It’s a skill to learn how to move the roll from the broken cassette to the new one. Make sure you pay attention to the way the cassette gets put together as you take it apart.

Set up

Plug the cassette player into the audio interface (see photos)

Open software

In Cubase

1.     Start a new project and configure it so that Cubase knows what’s going on.

2.     Name the project

3.     Make sure that the signals are working: The left and a right channel must go through the audio interface, aka the analogue to digital converter

4.     Tell Cubase how to find where the signal is coming from

5.     Play a bit and check the levels

6.     Rewind the tape back to the beginning, carefully

7.     Press record on the Cubase

8.     Press play on the tape deck

After recording

Export the recording into a wave file

Burn the wave file onto a cd 

This is what happened

The signal flow goes from the cassette player outputs, then travels through the inputs on the red thing (the Scarlett). Then the red thing processes the signal into digital information which goes out of the outputs via the USB cable, into the software on the computer, which manipulates the information and exports it into a wave file, and the information is then burnt onto the cd with Windows media player. 

Happy digitizing!

Reading Picture Books Aloud

I love reading picture books (they may even have saved my life when my kids were short). As a children’s librarian I got to present a lot of story-times and I believe picture books are suitable for people of all ages. Recently, in trying to recall some of my favourite titles, they eluded me. So I went to the library catalogue, and then the library itself to do some research. There I was, crawling around on the floor, pulling out books wedged spine-side up into the tiny cubicles of the children’s section, trying to identify hard-to-find gems. My first 3 suggestions fit a ‘cloth and culture’ theme. No surprise, as I love textiles, and all things fibre, yarn, fabric, sew, quilt, spin, knit, weave or felt related. That’s a pretty broad net, but you have to start somewhere. To deliver a good story-time, it certainly helps to be inspired by the book choices. 

A Pattern for Pepper, Julie Kraulis, Tundra Books, 2017

In this teaching story, Pepper learns about a tailor’s trade while searching for a fabric for her new dress. She helps design the pattern and wears her dress on a most special day, for an afternoon party. Houndstooth and ikat, pinstripe, toile and other designs are introduced, and each time she rejects them until the perfect one is found. I enjoyed this book because of the quality illustrations, the subject of fabric and clothing design, and the story of how Pepper comes to get a new outfit. This book could be a read-aloud for kids in grades 2-4, for talking about cloth and culture, dressmaking and tailoring from a European perspective.

Tags: art and design, cloth and culture, dressmaking, tailoring, grades 2-4

The Cat and the Fiddle: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes, Illustrated by Jackie Morris, Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, London, 2011

A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes is illustrated with bright watercolour paintings full of whimsy and the fantastical. Longhaired damsels in dresses of fine fabrics and animal companions adorn the pages. You will find dogs and horses, polar bears, mice, bats and weasels, ships and castles, as well as the odd knave. There were many familiar rhymes and a few new-to-me including, Baby’s Bed’s a Silver Moon, Little Thomas Tittlemouse and A Swarm of Bees in May. This book would be useful as a companion book for a K-2 story-time. I enjoy sharing one or two nursery rhymes with the kids to accompany a main story, and discussing folklore and the practice of reading pictures.

Tags: picture books, nursery rhymes, author-illustrator, grades K-2, watercolour, fantasy, whimsy, animals

Suki’s Kimono by Chieri Uegaki, Kids Can Press, Toronto, 2003.

On the first day of school Suki wants to wear her kimono. Her sisters do not think it is a good idea because she might get teased. She wears it anyway and enjoys the attention she gets for performing a circle dance she learned from her Obachan. The book genre is realistic fiction and it would work for grades 1-2.

Tags: Japanese American culture, circle dancing, kimonos, cloth and culture, schools, peer pressure, grades 1-2