Growing up in the 80's...kids were limited to archaic corded wall phones and laborious letter writing. I don't even remember when first my parents adopted the idea of an email address! Limited communication, or so it seems now, made for the perfect storm of electronic enthusiasm once my brother and I adopted the idea of communicating through Walkie Talkie's! In a family of eight children, my Mother instigated a structured bedtime hour that left many moments (seemed like hours) in quiet awareness...of how dry my Idaho eyes seemed to be...seriously...I could hear myself blink! My brother, Mike, who has always been the Night Hawk's-Night Hawk, also had trouble lulling himself off to sleep and when he was gifted a pair of Walkie Talkie's...it seemed as though it were the simple solution to our insomnia problems!
The Walkie Talkie's themselves weighed about three pounds each and could cause damage to the skin if dropped on the head (or so I've been told...wink, wink!) They had about a 30 foot range of communication which enabled my brother and I to talk into the hours of the night! There was never a need to ask each other's location (10-40...in Walkie Talkie lingo...not to be confused with taxes) because we both knew the other was in bed like we should be! We talked and laughed and used some basic Walkie Talkie codes to communicate back and forth with each other ...BUT... the Best feature of each Walkie Talkie was the Morse Alphabet listed on the inside of the handset. Twenty-six letters, with corresponding dots and dashes, that could easily disguise any conversation for eavesdroppers nearby! We loved it and would send each other messages, nightly. I must admit, Mike was much better at it than I...most especially because I would fall asleep in the middle of one of his morse code messages!
It was much to my brother's dismay that I did not obtain the fortitude of Late Night Morse Coding that he possessed! I always heard about falling-asleep-during-the-middle-of-morse-coding-message from him the next day...and rightfully so! Each sentence was a time consuming orchestration of dots and dashes that had to be perfect! It was great fun and a wonderful way for us to communicate, pre-text message days. It's a memory I will cherish for the rest of my life!
Let's have some fun...as it is the morning, and clearly I'm not at risk for falling asleep...yet...I'm going to morse code a message down below this Nutshell! For those of you who would like to experience the joy's of morse messaging, once you figure it out...how about you write your answer to the message in the comment space below! I dare you to have fun with it...Heaven's knows my brother and I sure loved it for the better part of our youth!
....drum roll please...NOW READERS...your morse code message:
in
one
word
describe
in
a
nutshell
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