The Last Word On Nothing

“It was nothing to just sit on the phone for an hour, wrapped up in those long curly cords,” writes my friend. “An hour-long phone conversation was totally normal. In my teenage years, I could just sit on the phone all night long.”

That’s a comforting image, isn’t it — my friend but younger, curled up with the phone. We’d been emailing about, of course, the pandemic, social distancing, self-isolating. My Twitter feed occasionally takes a break from curves, numbers, reports, and wild emotions to notice that it’s spending unprecedented time on the phone having conversations, among what must be millions and billions of identical conversations, everybody checking in and being checked in with: you ok? need anything? what are you doing?

I’m always impressed by how intensely we need to know what’s going on over there across the street, or down the road in another town, or across the country, or on the other side of the planet: I was just thinking about you, how’s it going, or as Sally who lives in foreign lands writes, “Roll call!”

I’m also impressed with the range of the conversations’ technologies. The local kids text their parents; the parents Facetime, Skype, Instagram, Zoom, and email their friends and jobs and their own parents. My mother used the telephone all day long it seemed, and when my grandmother wanted to talk to her sisters, she wrote letters.

My mother liked talking to her sisters too. Also her aunts and friends. She’d sit on a dining room chair next to the little phone table, dial from memory, and I don’t know what they talked about but the talk went on and on, hanging on the phone like my friend with the curly phone cord.

I used to like those cords, twisting them around my fingers while I, like my mother, talked on and on, I don’t know what about. Just finding out what’s going on, I guess, seeing what’s happening: everything ok? what are you up to?

And after talking on and on, the conversations would deepen: I don’t feel like I’m in control, I’m having trouble sleeping, I get so scared, I don’t know if I can do this. Lying in bed in the dark, phone tucked under my ear, lining up the coils of the cord to make a long tunnel, saying and hearing what we still say and hear, especially now: you’re going to feel better, don’t give up, you can do it, it’s going to be ok, it’s going to be ok.

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Photos: Ma Bell ad — The Connections Museum Seattle Exhibits; lady on phone – David Dodge