I don’t have a cell phone. Joyce has three.
One we use for an alarm clock and flashlight. One we haven’t used in three years. One we can talk on. It takes pictures and sends text messages too, if you’re into that sort of thing.
I don’t like phones that don't plug into anything. For one thing, it makes less credible the threat, “I'm going to come through this phone line and ...”
There's no obvious conduit for the fulillment, cartoon-style, of such an intention.
Another thing about plug-less phones is you can take them anywhere. Whose brilliant idea was that?
All the great excuses we used to have to avoid talking to people are gone. “I couldn’t get to the phone in time” was the best, and it was always true, even if the reason you couldn’t get to the phone in time was that you were running in the other direction, screaming.
My mom hated talking on the phone as bad as I do, but if we were just getting home from somewhere and heard the phone ringing from the driveway, shed launch a fleet-footed kid to dive through a window, preferably an open one, and go answer it before it stopped ringing. It was good exercise.
If we were sitting at home watching TV and the phone rang, we mostly ignored it, however. Logic didn’t enter into it.
We had “The Signal.” Two rings, hang up, call back. It was designed to avoid prank calls, sales people, bill collectors, people from the church, and my aunts and grandparents.
Years after the institution of The Signal as a screening device, somebody must have let it slip to Grandma.
The phone rang twice one afternoon, paused, then rang again.
“Hello?”
“Hi!”
“Grandma! Holy ..!”
A quiet chuckle. “Put your mom on the phone.” At that point, I don't think they had spoken in years.
Woe to the child who couldn't think fast enough and got Mom stuck on the phone. There was always the backup plan: “She’s in the bathroom.”
Anybody who consistently was able to get someone to answer our phone probably thought Mom spent most of her time in there. Since our house had only the one lavatory for the seven of us, I assume we children were the objects of pity.
Grandma always rang twice after that, which was how we knew it was her. The Signal became three rings, hang up, call back. We were threatened with death if the secret were ever released again.
Why did we even have a phone? Beats me. We weren’t allowed to call anybody because almost everything was long-distance.
Back then long-distance calling was right up there on the morality chart with drinking whiskey and looking at dirty pictures.
Probably we had a phone just for emergencies. To me, that only makes sense if you’re a fireman or a paramedic.
If somebody calls at 3 a.m. and tells me someone has been in an accident, it’s not like there’s anything I can do about it. Why not get a good night’s sleep — or several — before hearing the bad news? It’s not going to be more painful if the bad news comes in the form of a letter a few days later.
In the new century, the days of blissful, peaceful detachment from the people who want to talk to you are long gone. The only halfway credible excuse these days is to say you forgot to charge your phone — again. Even the ever-reliable “couldn’t get a signal” has gone by the wayside since the coming of the “Can you hear me now?” guy.
The best thing about cell phones is that owning one is a good excuse not to have a house phone. If you can get your wife to carry the cell phone, it’s almost like the good old days.
Ken York is the assistant editor of The Daily Record of Lebanon, Mo. He can be reached at kyork@lebanondailyrecord.com.
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