land lines

like so many of us now, i am almost never without my smartphone in hand. utterly dependent on its miracles, i use it for constant sms, photos, surfing, emailing and tweeting. with each notification ding, i think about how very seldom my phone actually rings. how rarely i use my phone for actually talking to anyone.

the telephone has always been my modus operandi. i remember first learning to use the telephone in my parent’s house. i was still so small that i needed to push a dinette chair to stand on to reach the phone mounted on the kitchen wall, how my fingers trembled with excitement that i was finally, oh finally, deemed old enough to learn to spin that rotary dial, be instructed in the polite ways of telephone calling and that if i was lucky, to be able to answer the phone when it rang through the house.

the magic the telephone held for me! i could summon my mormor when i wanted her and not be forced to wait for her call, anxiously hoping my mother would pass the receiver to my ear. i could call my friends and feel the electric current of their parents’ approval when i enacted my practiced politesse. my manners may not have been up to par for my own mother, but my friends’ parents were charmed. i felt that wave of needed affection right through the long curly cord into my very bones.

when i was a teenager, my mother complained bitterly that i tied up the lines with my marathon talks with girlfriends. in the days before call-waiting and voicemail, my pragmatic mormor suggested i have my own line. while my mother demurred, my mormor acted. for my fifteenth birthday i received a gorgeous modern princess phone and best of all my own line. months later i grabbed the newly delivered phone book to look up my own entry. when it wasn’t there, listed with my step-father, i was disappointed. as i flipped to the names of my mother’s family. i smiled widely to myself when i discovered my name listed just above my mormor. publishing me with my real name and not his, was a quiet, public rebuke to my step-father for not, in her mind at least, sufficiently shielding me from the cold malevolence of my mother. my name was printed without address but with dots leading to my very own number. seeing my name in that phonebook, i felt that i was, that i existed, that i mattered…above all, that i could be found.

that phone was literally my life line. while not as doggedly dependent on it the way we are now, i knew it was there and that it was mine to reach out to whomever i chose, whenever i chose. like Salinger’s Muriel, i was a girl for whom a ringing phone held absolutely nothing. i wasn’t preoccupied with worries of invitations. i was mostly comforted to know i had my very own conduit to a world outside of home. like my own bat-line, my princess phone was how i signaled for help when i needed to escape the oppressive darkness that lurked in the corners of my parent’s house. while ever-present sunshine poured through south-facing window panes, bathing the ashen blonde wood in bright light, i often tripped over the shadows of unhappiness that pervaded beyond the reach of the sun’s rays and lapped at my feet like a needy dog. my phone was my way out of the blinding dark.

in college, i took that phone and installed it on the night table next to my bed. by then i also had an answering machine. like little beeping presents, messages blinked with urgency when i came home from class, pressing play to hear the sometimes jubilant or sometimes plaintive voices of my friends, more often than not they were just flat demands to return missed calls but the delight of blinking red lights always held just a moment of anticipatory surprise.   

that time has ceased for me and really, for us all. caller id, texting and the permeation of 4G networks have eroded our ability to be unavailable or unreachable for much more than an hour. my phone still lays on my nightstand at night, ever vigilant in case of emergency or just simply on alert in case an inside joke appears in my mind before sleep and simply must be messaged to a conspiring friend. the wonder of mobility and portability have ironically allowed me to be always at home, except now, in the home I have created in my grown-up space, and that home is everywhere and anywhere at once.