Unless you are of "a certain age" you have missed out on one of the icons of the twentieth century: the telephone with the long, long cord. Moms used to be able to talk on the phone while cooking dinner, stretching the phone cord clear across the kitchen, dragging it from the wall phone through the boiling spaghetti water, narrowly missing the cord while chopping vegetables but never missing a word of the latest news from the neighborhood. Dads could have you hand it to them while they were in their recliners, stretching it from the kitchen wall to the living room and sometimes almost decapitating unsuspecting toddlers and dogs who came through without looking.
There was a little cushiony thing you could buy to put on the headset so you could lean your head over and hold the phone between your ear and your shoulder guaranteeing a crick in the neck that might last half a week, but it enabled you to then use both hands for other things. Some neatniks could even clean windows and bathrooms while chatting away. I wouldn't know from personal experience, of course, but I've heard it could be done.
Best of all, teen-agers could take the receiver, tugging the cord with them, and pull it into a nearby closet, laundry room or hallway, any place that had a door to close for privacy. At our house we had the stairwell to the basement close enough to drag the cord down at least three steps where we could sit for hours talking with kids we had just seen all day at school. Or boys.
Portables freed everyone from the long cord but they presented a new problem: Where, the heck, do they go? We have found them under the couch cushions, in the bathroom, on top of the refrigerator, in the garage, yes on the roof of the car, and in Dennis's pocket more than once. He got all the way to church one Sunday with the portable phone in his pocket. It didn't have coverage.
Dennis always kept the phone close by wherever he was in the house so when he fell asleep on the couch one evening and the phone rang he automatically reached out his hand for it, still a little asleep. Unfortunately, there was a glass of water where he expected the phone to be and he grabbed it, held it to his ear, shouted "Hello! Hello!", held it away from his ear and looked at it and said "Hello!" again, frustrated that no one was answering him and the phone was still ringing. I could see what he was doing but I was laughing too hard to get up and hand him the phone. If that was you calling, call us back.
When the phone company offered Call Waiting I thought we didn't really need it. No one ever really stayed on the phone that long. Well, there was that one time before we had it, okay, two times, that Dennis called the neighbors and asked them to come over to our house and tell me to get off the phone so he could call me.
It's not that I was on the phone enough to be neglecting my children after all. There was just that one time when Jake was about four that he kept bugging me while I was talking and next thing I knew Call Waiting beeped in and it was Jake. He had gone to the neighbor, Maureen, and asked to borrow her phone. Of course, she thought it was a serious emergency. He called to tell me he wanted a snack. After that Maureen seemed to watch him rather closely as though she wondered if he was a poor, neglected child who couldn't even get something to eat at home without going to extreme measures.
Jake was the one who was the phone addict at our house. He knew just what to do with it at an early age. Dennis traveled a lot when Jake was a baby but he would call every night and Jake would "talk" to him on the phone. I think he was telling him jokes because he would jabber, jabber, jabber, wait a minute and then fall over laughing.
Once when Dennis and I were at dinner with some important clients in a classy restaurant in Oklahoma City,-- do you remember Junior's ?-- the maître d' brought a phone to our table, set it on the starched white tablecloth and whispered to Dennis, "It seems to be an emergency, sir." It was Jake calling to tattle on his brother. And, of course, the first day of first grade, he decided half a day was enough, walked into the office at lunchtime, picked up the telephone on the secretary's desk without asking and called me. "I'm ready to come home now. Come get me."
Today even the portable phone is disappearing from houses. At Jakes house he has no land line. Everyone uses cell phones instead, the better to be instantly connected. He always has the latest model, knows all the ins and outs, plans and particulars. And he always has his phone close at hand. Recently, in fact, when he left one job that supplied him with his phone and the new employer's phone had not yet been issued, he didn't miss a beat---or is that beep?---he just walked around with Hayley's phone to his ear. The pink one. With the jewels on it.
I don't think Dennis and I are as dependent as that. We still have our wall phone, it even has a curly cord, albeit a short one, but it rarely gets used. In fact, Dennis is calling me on his cell right now. From the kitchen.
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