As you know if you’re a regular reader, both my children are in the Foreign Service, one for the last 17 years and the other for the last 12.
Between the two of them, they have been stationed in Yaounde, Cameroon, Athens, Greece, Beijing, PRC, Monterrey, Mexico, Surabaya, Indonesia, Ascunsion, Paraguay, Kingston, Jamaica and Guatemala City, Guatemala. They are both currently stationed in the most restrictive post they’ve had — Washington, D.C., during the pandemic.
We have visited them in Beijing, Athens, Kingston and Guatemala City. If you’re wondering why we didn’t make it to Mexico, Monterrey is in the middle of the drug wars and the U.S. government doesn’t let families visit their children.
Things are different in different places, but not as different as they used to be.
When we visited Pauline and her family in Beijing in Fall 2008, we watched the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin on live TV. In every single one of her posts, we have been able to make free video phone calls on Skype and its various descendants. The Internet has kept us in touch with all the news we need.
In fact, the only posting where we couldn’t keep in touch was Yaounde, which was pre-Skype.
When I compare that to the two years my first wife and I spent in Vienna, Austria (1976-78), it’s as different as you can imagine.
We didn’t have a television, mostly because there would have been nothing to watch. The only show in English was Sunday afternoon repeats of The Munsters, which went off the air in 1966 without me ever watching one episode.
Video recorders and DVD players weren’t around yet, and Vienna had only one theatre showing movies in English. It showed movies from the 1930s and ’40s.
Internet? Al Gore hadn’t gotten around to it, and it was nearly 20 years in the future. The only way to keep up with American news was through the International Herald Tribune, although later in our time there I subscribed by mail to Stars and Stripes.
Calling home to relatives in the States? We did that a couple of times, but it was $4 per minute in a time when we made a lot less money.
In fact, the only way we stayed in touch at all was writing letters, putting them in envelopes, putting stamps on the envelopes and dropping them into mailboxes.
Quaint, huh?
It’s a little bit ironic that I took the examination for the Foreign Service in 1977, and just like my two kids did decades later, I passed. Since many of the embassy folks saw me only as a non-working spouse, people were surprised that I turned out to have such good potential.
That qualified me for the second, more difficult exam, which if I passed would enable me to become an officer. But I had just a two-year college degree at the time and I knew my chances of being selected were extremely slim. I didn’t take the test.
When we returned home in 1978, I never lived outside the U.S. again.
When we visited my son Virgile and his wife Sterling in 2011, it was actually the second time I had been to Athens.
Or at least, a city called Athens. In the fall of 1983, I covered a college football game at the University of Georgia in Athens, Ga.
As for living overseas, I had reached the point last year where if Donald Trump had been re-elected, I would have tried to convince Nicole that we should move to France. It would have been a difficult deal. At this point in our lives — I’m 71, she’s two weeks away — I think she loves the U.S. more than I do.
And hey, with Internet, satellite television and Skype, the only hurdle for moi would be learning better France.
A lot better French.