1. Growing up in the country, we had something called a party line. For those of you not old enough to remember this, I'll explain.
This goes back to a time before Laser Disks (prehistoric blue ray movies) and Floppy Disks (ancient SD cards) to a time of Pong (the predecessor of all modern day video games) and televisions that had hand dials, no remotes and only three channels that went off the air after midnight. I kid you not when I say I can remember when the road we lived on was paved - not resurfaced, but surfaced for the first time from a dirt road to macadam. I remember a time before we had an actual street address and only lived on an RD (Rural Delivery) route. Our phone was large and clunky with a cord and a rotary dial - long before pocket-sized cell phones of the modern age. This was the age of the party line in the country.
What is the party line? All of the neighbors' phone lines were connected before we all got private lines to our phones. This meant that instead of having to wait for one of your family members to get off the phone so you could use it, you might also have to wait for one of you neighbors to get off the phone. It was easy to tell: just pick up the phone and listen if someone was talking. If you got a dial tone, you were lucky. Short, succinct phone conversations were encouraged. If you had a longer conversation, there was a chance your news would get out among the gossips. It wasn't unheard of to have someone pick up the phone and listen in on a conversation for any juicy tidbits. Fortunately, you could hear if someone picked up and if you didn't hear the telltale click of a hangup - well, many times you could have an angry voice telling you to get off the phone that did not belong to your mother.
Most times, people would get false information because they picked up in the middle of a conversation. Chances are that someone might get gossip out of context. Smart people wouldn't mention anything important over the phone. It was fun to make someone think that another person was listening in, but it would always get out. People knew who was a part of that party line. Close-knit communities are like that.
2. I like puzzles. Mostly I do sudoku, sometimes crosswords. Words With Friends keeps me going and keeps me in touch with others. Every now and then I'll get one of those little logic puzzle magazines from the bookstore or supermarket.
One puzzle popular to those magazines is often referred to as a Jacob's Ladder. It shows two words with a limited number of empty steps between them lined up vertically. The object is to change one letter in each step until the original word becomes the word at the end of the puzzle. For example:
The trick is to make sure that each word between is an actual word in the English language. It's not always an easy feat when you can only change one letter for each line, but that's the fun of it. This is kind of like six degrees of separation; how to make one word become another.
3. I've always been a fan of the song, "I've Heard It Through the Grapevine". There have been a lot of covers for it, but none have sung it as well as Marvin Gaye.
How excited was I when the dancing California Raisins appeared on TV? I wanted them! Hardee's had them with their kid's meals (if I remember correctly) and I had to collect them all. I had the whole band - the singer, the saxophonist and a couple of dancers. I was so proud of myself. Eventually, I even found a counted cross-stitch pattern featuring the Raisins. I grabbed graph paper and designed a whole scene that I later brought to life with needle and thread.
Twenty-five years later, I couldn't tell you where any of those things are. I think I still have the pattern someplace, but that is all that remains. If you're lucky, though, I'll probably still sing along to myself whenever I hear it.
4. Have you ever heard heard of the children's game, Telephone?
For a quick explanation, just line up a group of children in a row. Drunk people also do the trick. One person leads the game. That person whispers a phrase to the person at the head of the line. That person whispers it to the second, the second to the third, so on and so forth. It works better with ten or more players.
Depending on how well the middle people listen and pass on the information, plus how impaired the adult players might be, the resulting phrase could be very interesting. For example, the first person could get a phrase like "Suzie sells sea shells by the seashore". By the end of the line, we could have something like "Shawn sells his soul for soft serve in Seattle". It is an extremely rare occassion that actual phrase shows up at the end of the line, making it a very fun party game.
So what have you figured out? What do these four stories have in common? What is today's lesson, kids?
There's too much gossip in the world. We've got enough problems without misunderstanding our friends, neighbors and family. Every time a story passes from one mouth to another ear, words change, intentions differ and hearts get hurt. Relationships, be it acquaintances, friendships, lovers, organizations or businesses, get hurt or destroyed because everyone listened to what someone else said.
When will we learn to go straight to the source? Granted, you might not be happy with what you find out but I can guarantee you will get one of two answers: the truth or "it's none of your business". Sure, there's always someone who will start a rumor to see how fast it comes back, but remember one key thing the next time you hear a piece of gossip:
Avoid the mule by way of the horse's mouth.
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