Mar 1, 2024 4 min read

Most mornings around 10, the phone rings.

It’s my daughter, calling from upstate New York, where she shares a home with her husband. The calls go on for at least a half-hour, an unusually long time for someone who has always avoided talking on the phone.

The aversion to phone calls is apparently rampant among millennials, that generation that’s been raised on text messaging and FaceTime. Social media is awash in videos showing teens and twenty-somethings trying to figure out how to use a rotary phone.

On a recent morning call, I told my daughter about wall-phone communication.

“When I talked to a boyfriend or girlfriend on the phone,” I said, “I’d walk with the receiver across the kitchen and into the piano room, trailing the long, coiled cord behind me. Anyone going into the kitchen would have to navigate over or under the cord.”

“Weird,” Grace said, “but what’s a receiver?”

Our morning chats take on a nostalgic tone. She likes to hear what it was like growing up in my family.

“There was always someone playing Fur Elise on the piano,” I said, “and always kids in the family room waiting for their piano lesson to start.”

Eventually, our discussions move from my childhood to hers. Grace will bring up early memories of places we’ve gone, or toys she had, or meals I cooked.

“Chicken, brown rice and broccoli every night,” she recalls, and not in a good way.

“Not true,” I say, “and even if it were, you should be glad because it was healthy.”

In our calls, she scratches around at bits of memory, trying to recapture moments when she was a toddler, or in grade school. At 24, her brain is still stretchy and spongy; sometimes all it takes is for me to name a person or place and it all floods back for her.

She remembers the smell of the classroom at ballet school, the little door on the third floor of our old house that was a clothes chute to the basement, the games of animal charades I played on our porch with her and her best friend.

“Interminable,” I said. “You did the whole zoo.”

“I was a good elephant,” she said.

When she was just a few months old and we were living in Connecticut, a very kind woman came several days a week to care for Grace while I was busy writing and tending to my son, who was 4. Grace often asks about Maritza, and mentions vague, elusive images about her.

“I remember she smelled nice,” Grace said. “And I think I remember her pushing me on a swing.” I ask if she remembers how I took her to a mother-and-child music class, where we’d sit on the floor in a circle and sing songs.

“You refused to sit on my lap,” I said. “You wanted to dance around outside the circle the whole time.”

So many of our phone discussions begin with Grace asking, “Do you remember?” I often do remember, and can fill in some of the gaps.

I wonder if this is common among twenty-somethings – this need to reconstruct a childhood, to take the little scraps of memory and sew them together into a complete quilt? And is this something that only daughters need? My son, who is 28, doesn’t talk much about growing up. In our phone chats, he talks about the frogs in his aquarium, and his foster dogs.

Grace talks about animals, too – all those games of charades on the porch.

“I made a good elephant,” she said.

“You made an excellent elephant,” I said. “I remember it well.”