I never think much about my age and getting older. I’m healthy, I exercise, eat right and only drink wine on occasion. Although, the occasions seem to be getting closer and closer together.

Granted, my sons are now in their 40s and I do have a teenage grandson and two other grandsons soon to be in their teens, but the realization that I’m getting older too is not foremost on my mind. Until one of my younger granddaughters asks me if we had phones when I was younger.

Excuse me? How old do you think I am? “Of course, we had phones. Albeit, they were rotary dial phones, some hanging on the wall and some as desktop models.”

She asks, “Oh, you mean like the desktop computers?”

My answer, “No, we didn’t have computers.”

“You didn’t have computers? How did you search for anything?”

“We went to the library.”

“The library? You mean the library building?” My fair-haired, angelic granddaughter asked.

Smiling, I said, “You’d be surprised at the things you can find in the library.” Then getting back to the phone conundrum, I added, “In fact, sometimes if someone else was on the phone line we had to wait to make a phone call.”

She asked, “What do you mean, wait?”

Trying not to sound too ancient, I said, “Not everyone could afford a private line at that time, so we had to share a line with another party. That was called a two-party line. There were four-party lines too.”

She was aghast. “There were people talking on your phone?”

I shook my head in agreement. “A few years later my mom was able to afford a private line, so we didn’t get to listen in on other people’s conversations anymore.”

By now she was enthralled. “What was the phone hooked up to?”

“It was a telephone wire that came into your home and there was a little plug in the wall by the floor that you plugged the phone into.” Thinking I gave her the best explanation of phones in that era, I smiled smugly.

Nodding her head she said, “Sometimes mom or dad have to charge their phones because the battery runs down, so they plug it into the wall.” I could tell she was jubilant having figured this one out.

“No, honey. The phones didn’t need to be charged. They just needed a connection to Ma Bell so we could use them.” At that point I was sorry I mentioned Ma Bell. I knew what was coming next.

“Who’s Ma Bell, Nona?”

“It was a name given to the major company when a succession of smaller companies split from the major, like children.” By then I had totally lost her. At least, I thought I did. Her answer was simple.

“I see.”

Who knows, maybe she understood. I mean, she knows how to get ‘YouTube’ on my TV. I’m lucky if I can get Hulu and Netflix to work. I continued with my saga of how there were no answering machines, so if someone wasn’t home to answer the phone you had to call back later.

She on the other hand wanted to know why I couldn’t just text them?

How do you explain to an eight-year-old we couldn’t text. I was stumped, so I just said, “There was no texting back then.”

She shrugged. I thought this session was over and she was satisfied that her Nona was really old. Then came her next question.

“Nona, did you have cars when you were my age?”

I just sighed, smiled and hugged her. We would tackle that question another day.