The Phone Call

Thanks for joining me in this podcast journey! The first episode is an introduction to the tapes, and an explanation of how we got here: not just in my grief process, but also the where, why and what for about these tapes. These days, recordings like this might be a dime a dozen: in a world of zoom and social media, almost everything is recorded. At the same time though, what gets recorded is often not “the everyday,” or people in their ordinary lives. What’s recorded is the wish, the dream, the pretense, the mask—filter added. For my mom—and for me, too, back in 2000—having pictures, audio, and film or video recordings was a lot more rare. And as you’ll hear: what might have been awkward at the beginning—having a tape recorder on the table, thus knowing our words were being recorded—is soon forgotten in the exchange. Now, I listen, and when I hear my Mom call me Meliss (dropping the A as she almost always did), or when I hear the laundry buzz, or my mother’s voice talking from across the room as she takes the clothes out of the dryer, I am amazed by the simple, easy manner in which we went about our lives. Mother and daughter. Those are the kinds of life snapshots we almost never record. Because why would we? And yet, they are the most precious.