Day 207: This week we've covered the modern conveniences of extermination (compared to the Pied Piper), the modern ways we celebrate the accomplishments of the past and the importance of teaching later generations about them, and the modern conveniences we take for granted and feel entitled to have. Today, my mind is full of phone memories, which totally follow the theme. That does not always happen. Most of the time, my mind goes off on a tangent of its own, but today, the thoughts apply. Yay for me.
We had a telephone when I was a little girl. It was mustard yellow, and it hung on the wall in the kitchen. Everyone in the family knew how to use it. You picked it up quietly, brought the handset to your ear, and listened for a dial tone. If you heard someone speaking, you quickly apologized, and hung up. And it really wasn't polite to check again for five minutes, or you'd end up apologizing to the same person again. On the flipside of the call, if you were speaking on the telephone and you heard a click, it meant someone had joined. If they were polite, they would announce themselves, apologize for the interruption, and hang up. If they were not polite, there would be an awkward silence while you waited for them to acknowledge that they were there. Listening to you. It was kinda creepy, now that I think about it. Either way, if someone picked up, it was polite to end your call as soon as possible, since obviously someone else needed to make a call.
This was called a Party Line. Don't let the word "party" fool you. It was not a party. It meant there were multiple "parties" or families on the same line. We, in essence, shared a telephone with six other families who lived on our stretch of East Milo Road.
For younger people, I'm sure it's hard to imagine a time when you didn't have your own cell phone in your pocket. You may never have had a "landline" in your home. Perhaps the thought of sharing one phone with everyone in your family seems outlandish, and to share it with your whole block, preposterous. But I'm telling you, that's the way it was.
Our mustard yellow phone had a dial, not a grid of twelve buttons or a screen with an image of twelve buttons. When a telephone number had several zeroes in it, it meant that you would be standing there longer, because it took a while for the dial to go all the way around to zero and back. Dialing was actually fun. It made a cool noise. I didn't mind dialing, as long as there weren't too many zeroes. I can still hear Ruth Buzzy and Lily Tomlin doing a sketch about telephone operators. "One ringie-dingie. Two ringie-dingie." (It was a sketch comedy show - the forerunner to SNL. For heavens sake, I'll have to explain in a different post.)
Our mustard yellow phone also had a very long cord, because the only way to speak privately was to stretch the cord into the pantry. I used to pretend it was a red British telephone booth. I still have a thing for those telephone booths. Perhaps that is why. All that pantry talk time in my personal phone booth.
We felt our mustard yellow telephone was a spectacular modern convenience. I was a junior in high school when the last town in Idaho finally received telephone service. Bone, Idaho. Population: less than ten. It was a big deal. They were mentioned on national television. We felt ever so superior, because we'd had the yellow phone and our party line for years.
Nowadays, we carry personal phones that don't require coiled cords long enough to reach the pantry. We can carry them anywhere. And they don't just place telephone calls. They do everything. We can carry on our entire lives on our cell phones if we choose. That little screen can be our window to the world. That little screen can also be our view from a prison cell of our own making. All the ills of the world can be accessed just as easily as all the wondrous things this world has to offer.
Before you think I'm preaching, let me confess that I use my cell phone to do everything. I call, I text, I email, I schedule, I calendar, I research, I read, I calculate, I document, I photograph, I store, I create, I take note, I socialize, I remember, I organize, I design. I write some of these posts on my phone. I even write chapters of books on my phone. It is my assistant. I accomplish a great deal with this device in my hand. But I also do crossword puzzles and zone out to music and lose hours of my life needlessly categorizing pins on Pinterest. I waste time like a pro with this device in my hand.
As modern convenience grows, so does anxiety. Maybe we would do better if we knew that at any moment, a neighbor could pick up the phone and listen in on what we were doing with our time.
In this month celebrating national freedom (July 4th) and religious freedom (July 24th) perhaps we could spend some time unbinding ourselves from the fetters of our modern conveniences. We could have face-to-face conversations. We could play a board game. We could go on a walk and pop by to say hello to the neighbors, and while we're there, we could be grateful we don't have to share a party line with them.
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