PHONE

March 11, 2009 phone

You will know I am old one when I tell you that the phone of my childhood had a round dialer with 10 little holes around the perimeter of the dial. There was a number, along with some letters, assigned to each. You’d stick your finger into one of the holes and roll it toward the silver half moon next to number “1…abc”. It took a bit of time to dial a number, especially a long distance one, and any numbers that had excessive “0’s” took extra long. This is how we were taught patience in our generation. Some of us learned. Some didn’t. The sound of the phone ringing was the clanking of a metal hammer against a real metal bell somewhere buried inside the hard plastic casing. Phone cords hung like shriveled up Slinkies down the wall in the kitchen, stretched and twirled into themselves, so when you answered the phone and had to take it over to Mom who was at the stove, it yanked you back to the wall until you uncurled it with your fingers. We were taught phone etiquette as kids; things like: always answer pleasantly, but when the person on the other end asks for your parents reply with “Whom, may I ask, is calling?” And if someone asks for you, then you were to reply “This is she.” It was also against the law to call anyone before 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning., Even if you knew Sherry Payne was up and watching the Monkees on TV, it was illegal to call the Payne’s house before 10, or anyone else’s house. Certain hours of the day are sacred in their privacy.
Phone numbers sometimes had letters to help you remember them. You’d have to look at the dial and figure out what letter coordinated with what number, so that was always a pain. But you did tend to remember the numbers. There is a musicality to telephone numbers. They sort of sing when you say them, probably because of the rhythm of the pattern. I can still hear in my head the commercial from my early childhood…Eight Oh Oh… three two five….three five three five. Just for fun I just now dialed that number and lo and behold, it is still the number for Sheraton Hotels! I can’t believe it!!! I’ll bet Libby knew this, since she was over Sheraton's Reservations Training for seventeen international offices before she decided corporate life was going to eat away her heartstrings. So she quit and came home to us! Yay for Libby!
I’ll bet you Libby and George and AM can tell you the phone number of our childhood. Quick, do you remember your own childhood phone number? 412-655-4547. Before that I think it was 653-1864. I’m not sure why I remember that number, but I know it is a Pleasant Hills prefix. Now that is diving back. My kids could sing you their childhood phone number…ready kids…do you hear the music? Four five one two eight three one…repeated four times, following the song “I know my number, my te-lephone number….”
It seems the fate of the land line is currently in jeopardy. We live our lives in cells these days. Last night I was at John and Ashley’s and John mentioned that he saw on Facebook that it was Tom Shults’ Birthday. I picked up their phone and dialed Tom’s number to wish him a happy one. Some robotic voice on the phone told me that I could not dial long distance on this telephone without an access code. What the???? “We don’t have long distance on our land lines, Mom,” John said. We use our cells for those. See what I mean? Pretty soon every aspect of our lives will be so portable we will no longer need homes. We can pitch one of those tents outside of Sacramento and live with the homeless without skipping a beat. I can hear it now, out there in the community of a large tent city. No electricity, port-a-potties, campfires, and cell phones ringing through the wild night air.