What we have here is a failure to communicate.

(Sigh) So now it's Sunday, and I'm a little uneasy because I received no mail from my son this past week. That's a deviation from the pattern where I almost always get a letter on Thursday, Friday or Saturday. He has for several years been almost religious about keeping to a schedule of writing to me on Sunday nights and getting the letter mailed a day or two after. Sometimes just following a visit the letter is short, but it still comes, and I of course have usually written to let him know I arrived home safely. This time I sent him a packet with a short note and some reference material for his schoolwork. (I'm his channel to the internet.) I included some humor from my local newspaper, where they publish hilarity from the police blotter. One thing I enjoy about his letters to me is the little stick drawing at the end that usually tells something about his week's activities and mood.

Here are a couple of explanations for the silence on his end.

One, he could have written and mailed a letter and the USPS could have lost it or misdelivered it to one of my neighbors.

Two, the continuing shortage of stamped envelopes for purchase at the prison commissary could have stopped the usual process.

Three, he could be sick or in trouble.

Now you might think that a simple phone call could relieve my anxiety. But there's a problem there too because a few years ago I had a dispute with MCI who had the contract for prison-originated collect telephone calls. This telephone situation has been a long-standing object of criticism by prisoner advocates. Briefly, state prison administrators contract with telephone companies to provide secured collect-call service to inmates, and it turns out that the states often receive kickbacks from the very high charges. I discussed this with an administrator at ODRC and was told that charges for local calls and intra-state calls were negotiated by his office but that inter-state calls were not. And not only were MCI's interstate charges very high, at a certain point MCI decided to stop billing themselves and required advance payment if your local telephone company wouldn't agree to bill for them. The change wouldn't have been so bad if MCI had been a solid company at the time, with decent customer service, but that was not the case. Anyway, the end result was that I could no longer receive phone calls from my son and the letter-writing and visits increased.

During this recent visit my son and I discussed this a little more because as I grow older, as family members in Ohio become less able, it seems to me that we should restore the telephone communication and use it for emergency situations and confirmation of visits, etc. My son said there had been a change in telephone service providers and that he would send me the information in his next letter. So I wait.