The Christian Science Monitor recently reported, incorrectly, that the last telegram in the world would be sent on July 14. (A single telegram service is shutting down in India; the CSM somehow got the idea that this meant all services were ending everywhere. Telegram services will continue to serve India and over 200 other countries.) But something good came out of this mistake: There was a lovely story in Tablet magazine today about the one telegram a woman received in her life, in 1985. You should read it.

It made me think about the telegrams my grandfather sent my grandmother. I am the keeper of the telegrams. They’re in a faded, floral-printed tin box, the same one that held them in my grandmother Olla’s home in Sharon, MA. Olla died in 1982. My grandfather Harry died in 1957, long before I was born; he worked with heavy metals in the Watertown Arsenal during WWII and the family suspects that was the cause of the kidney cancer that killed him.

My grandfather was by all accounts funny and witty and utterly smitten by my grandmother. But I don’t think I knew the woman he adored. By the time I was a sentient being, my grandmother was a pinched, unhappy woman. She’d been widowed young and left poor, with three kids; she had Cushing’s Disease; she was clearly in pain a lot of the time. So it was lovely to read these mementos of a time when she was young, happy and in love. And Harry expressed himself so well in this abbreviated form of communication! (The telegram: the Twitter of its day.)

Every month on their anniversary (May 10, the same as my husband’s and mine), for the first year of their marriage (which began in 1936), Harry sent Olla a telegram. He sent some to her office at The Department of Public Works.

(Charry = chary, which means wary. Which wouldn’t rhyme as well.)

And soon it was three years…

And…babytime! When my mom was born, in the early 1940s, Harry sent a telegram. I wonder if he was at a nearby bar, like Don Draper.

Her first Mother’s Day as a mom:

Pretty envelope.

Fourth anniversary…

Olla’s first birthday, post-baby…

He sent this when she was still in labor with their 2nd child. I bet she found it real funny.

My Aunt Belleruth arrived soon afterward. I hope it was soon, anyway.

And then it was their 10th…

That’s the last telegram. There are love letters, but I won’t share those.

Harry died in 1959.

Western Union stopped sending telegrams in 2006.