Long before marriage and medicine, when I was a high school kid, we had a phone in the hallway. Its earlier cousin was the upright one you’ve seen in museums and old (very old) movies. You lifted the earpiece and clicked its little holding cradle.
My mother, a telephone operator in Pittsburgh before she married, explained what happened next: The operator took a sort of cable linked to your phone and plugged your line into the one you wanted. You’d think it would be a private, two-person thing, but there could be a lot of people on the line — the operator, the other person, you and, well, the neighbours. And your mother. Talk about social media.
That phone was central in the house and the family. Its replacement, a black-but-jazzy, rotary dial thing, was cool. “David, it’s for you!” my mother would say, both she and the phone essential cogs in the wheel of the family and its business. Her picking up the line meant she could ask, “Who was that?” intent on knowing who my friends were and what we were up to. She wasn’t nosy; she was cautious. It was high school, a tricky navigation for a mother and her not-so-easy-to-manage kid.
That’s all gone now: my mother, sadly; the teenager, of course; the not-so-private, shared communication; the central, single phone. The non-human things have been replaced, though, almost sequentially, by the wall phone; the princess phone; the touch-tone; the flip phones; and now by those little palm-held, private things. You know what I mean; you’ve been there for most of this journey yourself, I bet.
Fast forward 60 years. The other day, we were looking to connect with someone we hadn’t seen for a while. I wanted to wish him Happy Birthday. Maybe Happy Groundhog Day. No big deal.
“Do you have Henry’s email, honey?” I asked The Boss, on her computer.
“No,” she said. “When I want to reach him, I think I text him. Though, come to think about it, I maybe WhatsApp him. No, no,” she said finally, brightening. “I know. I Facebook-Message him. Not LinkedIn, though; I don’t, you know, do Linkey-Dinkey.”
Don’t get me started.
Used to be, in the old days, you’d just send the guy a birthday card. Or you’d, like, pick up the phone, wish him a happy day and, bingo, the job would be done. Not now, apparently.
Back to that central landline phone. We have one, though I’m not certain why, exactly; it never rings. It’s the one where you hear that annoying Bell Woman, the snarky one who says, “You have dialed a number to which long distance charges apply.” You can almost hear her say, “Stupid!” as you hang up. Under her breath, quietly.
