Technological Ghosts
How the Departed Give Birthday Gifts
My parents always screened their calls, through a cassette-eating answering machine, listening to whomever was speaking before deciding to pick up the phone. When the tapes would get full, they’d just rewind and record over until the magnetic tape got too worn out, then pop in a new tape. Occasionally, my mom would want to keep a message, would pop the tape out, and would stick it into the box of keepsakes she kept in the bottom drawer of the nightstand next to the bed. (The smell of cassette tapes and furniture polish are linked in my olfactory memory forever, as she also kept the boxes of cassette tapes I recorded on my Radio Shack cassette player/recorder pretending to be a radio show host. I was desperate for a podcast in 1984, way ahead of my time.)
When the world rolled past cassettes and into digital, my mom lamented her inability to have that box of cassettes of voicemails (though caller ID was a delight). She, nevertheless, religiously saved messages she wanted to keep, first on the memory of the phone with older cell phones, then through cloud data, keeping a record of messages and calls that she would periodically return to just to hear the voices of people she loved. The box started to include old cell phones when she upgraded to a new one, with full voicemail boxes and memory cards packed with text and voice messages. The connection record was still there.
Machines and technology give us a tangible link; we can listen to the past, from the voices of famous figures delivering speeches to the rushed heartfelt “I love you” from a grandparent who had just been calling to check in. That’s a gift. A beautiful gift.
The digital world has also caused the existence of a few technological ghosts.
A few months ago, I was searching through my own digital record and stumbled upon a voicemail left by my mother. She had called, clearly, by accident, a pocket-dial, as she always kept her phone in her pocket or in her purse close to her. I could hear her footsteps walking through the house, echoing on the wood floors, could hear her breathing, the rustle of fabric (that I almost identified as the satin lined pocket of her favorite robe, which, on coming to me after her death, still smells of her perfume a year and a half later). This. This was a gift. To hear her breathing a year and a half after she drew her last breath, to imagine her walking the house never knowing she held me in her pocket, that we both shared a moment linked by accidental technology, that I was always, always, always in that pocket, sharing that breath, that is a technological ghost. A connection that reappears months later to slightly break your heart.
My own phone is a repository of photos. I’m impeccably organized, photos arranged in albums by event and by theme. Some, I noticed, had accidentally left the Live setting on, and, when pressed, will move like the photos in Harry Potter. More technological ghosts, as I can see my mother, mouthing the words, “I love you” in sending me a selfie of her and her flowers, waving enthusiastically to me from the beach, smoothing a lock of hair off her forehead before composing the perfect grin. I found video after video of times when my niece or my nephew grabbed my phone during a family dinner and raced in circles around the table, camera on, videoing us laughing, the clink of glasses, the exhalations and exclamations of family.
Today is my thirty-eighth birthday. I listened to a voicemail left by my mother years ago, singing me a happy birthday, and wishing me, as she did every year, a happy best friend anniversary, reminding me that she loved me from the moment I was born, that we would always share a heartbeat as we had once done. I knew that somewhere on my phone I had snapped a photo of a snapshot of the day I was born, my mother smiling with exhaustion and radiance into a rather ugly looking little bundle that was baby-me. I wanted to see that look.
I opened the photo app, went to the phone-created album labelled “Mom”- and received the prompt that there were new photos of “Mom” to approve from the face-recognition software on the phone.
Technological ghosts.
My finger hovered over the screen to tap it to view those photos for approval, shaking slightly before pressing down.
A photo of me smiling on my way into work. A photo of me pushing a lock of hair off my forehead. A photo of me mouthing the words “I love you” before sending a selfie off to my niece. Another of my profile, another full on, and another and another and another, until the album labelled “Mom” is filling and filling and filling with me and with her, sharing a space together.
The technological ghost steps in, on my 38th birthday, to remind me that she is always, always, always right there in my pocket and that in some way, that heartbeat is still shared.
For an audio version of this story, please visit my podcast, OstraCandice.
