From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
I hope that I don’t have to go calling next Saturday afternoon. Going calling is very tiresome. I think that I prefer going to school. All the parlors are the same, very unpleasant. They are either green or gold sometimes red, Grandmother calls it plush and they all have glass cases that are full of things that you are not allowed to touch. Little statues of sheep and milk maids and windmills and ladies sitting in chairs with gentlemen standing over them playing the guitar or mandolin. Some of the parlors have sofa pillows with fringe or tassels or shredded leather with Indian heads and colored beads. I would really love to see a parlor like the picture of one in my “Little Lord Fauntleroy” book. That picture was of a room with a big window and lots of sunlight and the drapes were flowered and on the tables were pots of real flowers. Maybe only in England the parlors are like that or maybe there are some rooms like that here in this country too but Grandmother’s friends and relatives have these gloomy ones. There was one friend of my Grandmother’s who was kind and sweet and I was happy in that house. She never told me not to do anything and when Grandmother kept telling me not to do this and that she said, “Oh! The dear child can’t hurt anything, do let her play.”
Today’s entry brings back memories for me. My mother would often take me along when she visited friends in Larkspur. They had no children and their house was very orderly. My mother would constantly admonish me not to touch anything. I was always terrified and uncomfortable there.
By the time I was born, “calling” was no longer something that one did. Yet when I was in high school, the company that sold senior photos included an option that included a few hundred calling cards that included one’s name and nothing else. My friends and I exchanged them with notes on the back at the same time that we were signing each other’s yearbooks. I had no idea what they really were for, but my mother insisted they would come in useful one day. They haven’t.