Phone Home

I was in Kindergarten or First Grade when my Granny bought me my first telephone.  It was a cream and gold, princess phone and I adored it.  I also employed it frequently to call Granny and natter away about anything that came to mind.  I felt very grown-up.

It wasn’t my own phone line, mind you, but it was a phone in my bedroom, and I could use it whenever I liked.  Back then, I loved talking on the phone.  Now?  I think I used up all my phone talking in my teen years.  My word.  Jamie, or Karen and I would get on the phone and talk for hours.  In my teen years, my friends and I would start phoning each other at 5am (using the Time & Temperature trick.  You had to have call waiting for this to work, but one person would call Time & Temperature and let that message play out for 60 seconds, and wait for the other one to dial their phone number and beep in on call waiting.  That way, your phone never rang, so you didn’t wake up your parents.  This is not to be confused with the Time & Temperature trick used to make Sister Isabelle believe your mother said you could leave school early.) and talk until we absolutely had to hang up to get to school.  After school, we’d be on the phone again, until a parent was stomping around insisting we hang up.  And, usually around 11pm, we’d use the T&T again, and talk until after midnight.  I cannot tell you the number of times I fell asleep while talking on the phone.

I think this is why I am so tired as an adult.  I talked too much and didn’t sleep enough as a teen.

The other day it hit me that Thor has no access to a telephone.  We don’t have a land line, and it seemed absurd to consider a cell phone for a 6-year-old.  But what would he do in case of an emergency?  Would he be able to use B’s or my cell phone?  You know what’s coming, right?

Thor has a cell phone now.

No, he’s not carrying it to school in his Lightning McQueen backpack.  It’s plugged into its charger on the wall, and that’s where it will stay.  I got him a freebie, pre-set the speed dials for the family numbers, and set parental controls on everything else.  Basically, he has a tiny telephone, on which he loves to talk, and talk, and talk.

He called my mother the other day and I heard him ask, as he was settling down in the middle of my bed for comfort, “Now then, Grandma, I want you to tell me everything you know about bones, and how they are in your body, and how they grow, and how they are in your head.”  It reminded me of calling up Granny and asking things like, “If God is in the sky, but once there was no sky, where did God sit while he was making it?”  Grandparents are good things.