It’s not true to say we didn’t play with our grandma’s phone. Not the way children do now. We weren’t prompted with apps, or videos, but we did have fun!

There was only one telephone in this house that raised nine children. And it was a party line (meaning the neighbors also used it.) The chord for the receiver rested in a heap on the kitchen floor. It had to be long. It had to stretch through the kitchen to the stairs. I suppose we could have set the receiver down and then walked up the stairs to yell at grandma in the sewing room, but instead, when getting a call, we clutched the phone to our chest and walked it and the cord as far as it would go, disappearing all the coils to a flat line. Grandma would then waddle the call. Pull the receiver from our sweaty hands and “talk on swede” so we couldn’t understand. It was so exotic. It was all my cousins and I could do to not to crawl through the line and enter this magical world. Instead, when grandma was off the phone, we would sneak back and hope to listen in on the neighbor’s conversation. I don’t know how she knew, but she always did — yelling at us from the sewing machine, “Hang up the phone.” We hung it up, but did the next best thing, taking turns wrapping ourselves up like mummies in the coil of the cord. Standing on the “lazy susan” we could spin ourselves free, until someone threw up from the dizzy.  We didn’t have the internet, but oh, the places we went on that single landline.

I was listening to a podcast the other day while going for a walk. It would have been hard to imagine that one day my phone could be with me, miles from home. The magic is still dizzying. The podcast expert was comparing the progression of our times. Unfortunately we have not made the advances proportionate to our advantages. And it got me thinking, questioning, am I? Am I doing the best with what I have? I hope so. I want to! I want to be as curious as I was when the coil of the phone wrapped around my face. When I could travel in time and space with only my imagination. There is so much still for all of us to learn. To experience. We just can’t lose sight of the magic. 

The morning sun is ringing off the hook!  I race to the day, yelling “Phone!!!!!!!!” 

Answer the call.