I remember phone booths. When they were all over the place. It's kinda funny, isn't it, that we carry these cellular devices in our pockets and purses with us literally everywhere these days, and yet I am certain I spent way more hours talking on the phone when they were not nearly as accessible than I do now. I guess there's a reason we call them mobile devices now rather than phones. I mean, they are phones, but it's almost like a diminished secondary function. But I vividly remember when I would have to stop somewhere to use a phone. Where it was physically located. Stuck to something. Where I would actually pick up the receiver ("I'll make you a believer..."). And literally hang it up when I was done. Physically, on a knobby hook built to hold the phone receiver.
I also remember old melamine rotary phones. I still have the mustard yellow one that once sat on my mother's night table when I was a child. It still has the typed phone number (still my parents' phone number, in fact) on some yellowed paper slid beneath a yellowed-clear cover in the center of the dial. I told my Mom I wanted it in case there were hurricanes and I lost power (when I lived in Louisiana), and so she let me have it, but really I wanted it for sentimental reasons. I'll never get rid of it. But I digress.
Phone booths. A relic of the time when we called each other. When talking was how we communicated instead of typing. I deeply miss that.
Apparently I'm not the only one. There are a couple of competing metaphors in my mind with this one, so I'll just dive into the first one that came to me....
See, there's this phone booth that became special recently. Because somebody had an idea and acted on it. And missed phones, too. Like me. And it moved me. I was driving on my way to work this morning, singing appropriately, in fact, as I dodged the too many potholes on my commute ("... I’m driving, here I sit... cursing my government... for not using my taxes to fill holes with more cement..."), and I decided I needed to share this very special booth.
Like flowers on a grave site, someone in my neighborhood did this to an old phone-less booth adjacent to the parking lot where I always stop to get gas. So I pulled over and stole this little glimpse of it to share here.
In a way, it laments the passing of not only the phone booth as a physical thing, but also the passing of verbal communications we all took for granted, which were once so much more personal and intimate than text on a screen. Not that text on a screen isn't majestic in its own right (hello, I'm typing this and you're reading this... which is pretty magnificent in the grand scheme of things if you really think about it). It's just that voices back and forth -- giggles, sighs, gasps, overlapping excited stories, free flowing tangents, pregnant pauses... those are all lost in the everything-typed world in which we now live. I'm grateful for the ease of communication typing bestows, but I miss the intonation. I miss voices. Phones that we had to use because we had no other choice gave us a different kind of richness. Now phones, er devices, that are forever at our fingertips pretty much forget they can do the same thing. So these roses mourn the passing of the voices unheard these days. Because typing.
The other metaphor that came springing into my mind when I stared at the phone-less booth: all those intonations, whispers, laughs, stories that come pouring out of actual phones... each of these is a precious bloom in and of itself. Temporally limited, but bright and beautiful in its vocal blooming and fading, crescendos and silences.
Man, we should use our phones more. I mean, we don't even have to pay outrageous long distance bills anymore. It's all included. How is it that the ease and convenience of phones has somehow endangered the existence of actual, real phone conversations? It's not that I never talk on the phone. That's not true. When I do, and when I'm lucky, phone calls last hours. But they are infrequent, which I lament. But I am moved to do it more and more. To reap the blooms that fall on my ready ears and to cast my own voice into the receiver, to be joyfully received.
It's not quite time for new years' resolutions, but I'm beginning to think mine might include more good phone. There's nothing quite like good phone. Roses, indeed.
I remember feeding those voracious things dimes, then quarters. Remember holding a heavy melamine receiver to my ear for hours, until my hand ached. My grandparents had a party line deep in Mississippi, where you had to listen to the ring pattern. We have definitely become more remote.
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