The Stretch of Time

I know that most if not all of my readers think that I’m young and hip. That’s because I look young and hip ... at least, in my own head. But sadly, here’s the reality.

When I was a tadpole, I remember looking at my grandparents’ telephone. There was an earpiece you could lift up and put to your – where else? – ear. And a nice lady named Mabel, or possibly Martha, at the central office would say, “Number please.” You would give her the number of the phone you were calling – it would be something like “35” or “679”, and she would physically connect your phone with the other phone by plugging an electrical cord (your phone line) into a jack (the other phone line) on a patch panel.

Off I went to grade school. One day the class was excited because there was a big change coming to telephones and the teacher was going to explain it to us. Sure enough, the teacher told us that soon telephones would have something called “dials” and when you wanted to make a call you would lift a handset to your ear and you would hear a “dial tone”. Then you would poke your finger into one of ten holes in a round disk and spin it around once for each digit in the phone number you were calling. After that, the connection was automated. Goodbye Mabel. Or possibly Martha.

My family moved into a new house. We had a telephone but it was connected to the phone company by something called a “party line.” This meant that we shared our phone line with our neighbors. Our neighbors had children – little girls who liked to play on the telephone. My dad would pick up the phone to call someone and he would be unable to place a call because the neighbor girls would be on the phone laughing and giggling. So one day he called the phone company and he ordered something rare in those days: a “private line”, our very own personal phone number that belonged only to us and no one else.

The little girls that lived next door grew up. One of them married a preacher and they had a baby girl of their own. That baby girl grew up, married, and had two baby girls of her own. Those girls are now age 16 and 14, and when they aren’t talking or texting on their smart phones they’re using their phones to post messages to Facebook or to tweet about their favorite boy bands.

And here I sit with three phone numbers of my own. Whereas my parents shared a phone number with their neighbors, I have a mobile phone number, a magicJack phone number, and a Google Voice phone number. It’s only through dent of determination that I don’t have even more phone numbers. It’s been years since I’ve had an old-fashioned landline telephone. I don’t expect to ever have one again.

In 60 years, today’s tadpoles will be senior citizens. No one can imagine what phones be like in that far-off day. But one thing is sure: whatever today’s phones evolve into, it will be something that no one today would ever recognize as a telephone.