I never thought I would hear myself say these words, but… I miss my landline. That seems a strange utterance coming from someone who has such a difficult time using a phone of any kind. More accurately, I miss the telephone attached to the wall with enough cord to allow me to reach a comfy chair. We didn’t call them landlines, of course; it was simply – the telephone.
Remember the days before the cordless phone and before features like call waiting or call interrupting or call rather be talking to someone else. Remember when you could drive in your car and no one could reach you until you got home. Remember when you never had to utter the words, “Are you still there?” It was all so simple, and we took it for granted. We knew everyone’s phone number without a second thought. We had party lines that challenged the notion of privacy, and there were actual busy signals. One New Year’s Eve I was home alone and having a lengthy gab on the phone. My father had the operator break in and tell me to get off the phone. I thought he must be some sort of spy to have that kind of power. He just wanted to wish me Happy New Year it turns out.
I remember my sister’s friend who not only had her own compact bright blue princess phone with the rotary dial under the handset, but she also had the phone in her bedroom and her own dedicated telephone line. That was the height of luxury; she had arrived. I remember thinking she was only seventeen and how could life be any grander than that. I think the bar was set a bit low when I was fourteen. The downside of having a wall mounted phone was having to share your conversations with everyone else in the house who seemed to be drawn to the area when the phone was in use as though the ringing of the phone had some sort of strange magnetic force.
The human race seems exactly that, a species dedicated to doing things in a hurry, requiring our conveniences to be increasingly quicker. I once witnessed a middle-aged man vocally chastising the staff of a McDonalds in Toronto, his voice angry and aggressive. “I thought this was fast food,” he shouted waving his fist. “Really,” I wanted to say, challenging his code of ethics. “Is this the hill you want to die on today?”
We all know that Alexander Graham Bell gets the nod for the first telephone patent in 1876. He was born in Scotland in 1847. He was the middle of three sons and the family moved to Canada in 1870 after his two brothers had died from tuberculosis. Bell moved to Boston in 1871 to teach at the Boston School for the Deaf and taught at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Massachusetts and at the American school for the deaf in Connecticut. He married a young deaf woman, Mabel Hubbard, whom he met while at Boston University. The focus of his inventions and curiosity was mainly to develop a means of communication that would help his mother who was partially deaf and his wife, but of course he went on to invent many other useful devices. Bell and his family spent the summers near Baddeck on Cape Breton where he did much of his research in a grand home he built and called “Beinn Bhreagh”, which in Gaelic means beautiful mountain, to honour his Scottish heritage. After his death in 1922, he was buried at Baddeck.
The first words that were heard in a successful telephone transmission were spoken by Bell himself: “Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you” and not “can you hear me now”. All joking aside, the telephone has made life much simpler, connections with friends and family are part of our daily routines rather than waiting for Sunday discounts. I can’t help wondering if the world has gone out of focus for many, for those who rely on their phones for everything from entertainment to information to connection. I see them walking down the street, able to navigate while reading, their eyes glued to their phones. At any event or sight of wonder, the crowds are filled with arms raised with phones in hand to capture the moment in a photo. Why not just take it in with our eyes and with our ears and with all our senses on high alert so that we might remember the moment in its fullest sense rather than relying on a photo or a video. Just a thought. For now, I’ll keep trying to memorize phone numbers and not get annoyed in my daily daughter conversations on their drive to work when I lose contact due to a dead zone. I can’t help but think of Albert Einstein’s opinion of the phone, “I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots.” I’ll do my best not to be one of those idiots.
wendistewart@live.ca
