I’m not saying I’m addicted to my phone, but I once nearly tore my nipple off on the sharp edge of wooden paneling while running towards the jingling fiend. But again, not addicted. Not really.
My love goes back to our black rotary dial phone we had when I was young. She sat on a tiny table along the wall, her spiral cord hanging to the floor in a mass of tangle.
We had a party line with four others, so there were no secrets in our neighborhood. For those of you who don’t remember Sampson And Son, a party line means that more than one home shared the line, as if in the same house, and if someone was already on the line, you had to either wait your turn, or pick up and check until you irritated them enough that they hung up.
If you picked up the receiver at an angle and carefully put your finger over one button while lifting the handset, and then ever so slowly removed your finger, you could listen in without making a clicking sound, indicating someone had picked up. It was a well-developed snooping art that took years of practice. Not that I did that.
As a teenager living in rural Alaska, the phone was my lifeline to the outside world. I was on it as much as possible, tied to the wall by a massive snarly wire. Late in the night I’d sneak the giant block of a phone down the stairs on its twenty foot cord that, if stretched to maximum length, barely reached inside my bedroom door enough to close out the sound. Sometime in the wee hours it would ring once and I would snag it up quickly so nobody would hear the echo in the hall just outside my room. My boyfriend would be there, waiting to talk sweet things to me until daylight…(or arrange for me to meet him at the end of the driveway.) When we’d finished the charade of ‘you hang up…no you hang up…okay, let’s hang up together…’ I’d carefully carry the clunky phone back upstairs until the next night, when I’d do it all over again.
When cell phones came along, I was one of the last people on earth to get one. My friends were carrying thick, heavy, antennae sprouting cellulars while I was still plunking quarters in the booth and waiting for my call to be connected.
But it didn’t take long before I’d joined the ranks of the communication junkies and clipped a giant Erickson to my belt. I’m not one of those people who gets a new phone every two months, or just has to have the latest model. I tend to hold on to mine until I’ve dropped it in the toilet in Vegas while heavily intoxicated, or dump it into a pond while shoveling, because cleavage is not the snuggest pocket idea.
I’ve not been without one ever since and I’m not sure I could be. I’d like to think I could easily go live in a cave somewhere and never miss technology…and then I break my pinky toe jumping over a log so I can catch the call before “My Humps” stops streaming from the tiny speaker…and I rethink the idea of complete abandonment of the modern world. Maybe I’ll just start with not sleeping with it under my pillow…though the convulsing may affect my texting, so maybe not.
