Nothing like moving to Brasil just to get nostalgic for small town Nebraska.

Actually, I'm not nostalgic. Perhaps a little melancholic about the passage of time, but what's new about that?

The town where I was raised, Genoa, Nebraska, has had roughly 1,000 residents for at least since I was a kid. Since the world began with my birth, who knows how many people lived there ten years earlier.

It had three small grocery stores then (we didn't know the word Supermarket). Now, it still has about the same population I think, but it only has one market and most of the other stores have now closed too. The taverns will be the last to go.

 In retrospect, it is easy to see that this post WWII world, which had barely had time to take root, already contained the seeds of its own demise built into it. The middle class was growing, everyone was becoming more mobile and less tied to their home towns and stores like this one pictured couldn't compete with bigger competitors 20-25 miles away. It was a concern even then. People were probably a little ashamed of shopping down the road in the larger city to save a few cents, but they all did it, even if they felt a little guilty.

 To give a perspective, the teenager in the top photo is probably three years older than me, so I would have been familiar with everything in this picture.

The real reason for this particular post is the phone number in the bottom photo. Number 6. It makes me feel so old. I can almost, just barely, remember the time when everyone in town received a new 7-digit number, and I can almost make myself believe that I remember the era before that when one would pick up the receiver and wait (perhaps after dialing "O,") for the operator to blandly request "number, please."  I wonder now what the transition was like. Did every home have to buy a new telephone? I kind of recall that phones at that time were the property of the telephone company, so probably we all just got new ones. I wonder if anyone bothered to sympathize with the operators who lost their jobs (and opportunities to eavesdrop, I don't doubt).

One last note: I just got off the phone with my mother. Her number in the assisted living facility is the same one the Martin family had from the beginning. WYman 3-7728. Now, of course, WYman 3 = 993, but that's not what I'm thinking when I punch in the number here in São Paulo.