Staying Connected
I was chatting it up over the fence with a couple of my neighbors when one of their cellphones set off in a cute and personalized ringtone, actually the same one my brother has, sounds like a flying saucer landing in a 1950’s sci-fi movie. Of course he took the call, I guess figuring the answering machine voicemail function might not work. My guess: it never gets used. The call was from his mizzus wondering where he had got off to now.
“Right here in the backyard with Skeeter and Ralph,” I heard him say. Ralph, both of us waiting for Barry to finish up, pulled out his own cell and fiddled with it, maybe checking to see what our weather was. “I-phone 7,” he said proudly, like I’d done research on what phones are what. “Yours?” he asked.
“My what?” I answered and Barry joined back in now that his whereabouts were no longer the mizzus’ concern.
“Cellphone,” Ralph said. I told him I didn’t have one. “Seriously?” he asked, fairly new to the neighborhood, not yet tuned into the Time Warp across the highway where I lived in the early 20th Century. “How do you talk to anyone?”
“Like we’re doing now,” I told him. He looked at me mistrustfully, the way an urbanite might look at a hayseed, not certain his leg wasn’t being pulled by the local yokel. It’s ten years now since Apple introduced the I-phone. Ten short years and now I’m a hopeless anachronism, a cave man in New York. “When I first came here we had a party line,” I informed Ralph and Barry too.
“My god,” Barry said, “how long have you been here?”
I wanted to say 1915, phones just invented, but I worried they might believe me. Or that I might shock them with tales of outhouses and no TV, horror stories of shack life circa 1977 when I left civilization to come out to this backwash cul-de-sac of the American Dream. But now it was Ralph’s phone ringing. “I gotta take this,” he explained unapologetically, answering it on the first ring.
“And I gotta go,” I replied and drifted back across the highway that separates us into a now distant past, a small figure moving into the fogbanks of a history soon to be forgotten completely, far far from cell range.
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