We have a wall phone in our kitchen. My public rationale for keeping it is that friends or relatives we haven’t seen for ages might have only our landline number from years ago, even if no one remotely connected to my distant past has made that phone ring for a long, long time.
Truth is, I keep it for a different reason. It’s the same reason I still hang clothes on the line in the back yard, starting with the first warm days of April and going to Halloween, clothes that dry in the sun and smell like the wind.
On April 8, 2024, Western New York will experience a total solar eclipse. “Our goal right now is just to get the word out there, because this will be incredible,” said Michael Humphrey, whose astronomical association is focused on helping onlookers understand what they’ll see.
It’s a reminder of my parents, gone now for 35 years – but whose presence I feel in old routines.
The kitchen wall phone has the same effect. When I was a kid, the kitchen phone was at the center of everything. You wanted to make plans with a buddy – or, harder yet, to call a girl – and you had to do it in the kitchen with your mother four feet away, doing the Jumble over cigarettes and coffee as she pretended not to hear every word.
Today, the wall phone is my…
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