When I was a kid, all I had was the house phone, and not my own line like some of the other kids I went to school with. I shared the phone with my folks and my younger sister. But guess who had the phone the most? That’s right. I.
From about 7th grade to the time I graduated high school, I would say 70 percent of the phone calls to our house were for me, and about 90 percent of those calls were from girls. And because it wasn’t until my sophomore year of college I received my first cell phone (my mom was old school to a fault, she refused to even get me a pager back when Airtouch was all the rage), the ring of that house phone was my favorite noise in the world, because I knew there was a good chance that on the other end of that noise was some girl’s sweet voice I wanted to hear.
A lot has changed since those days, the late 90s, when one either had a cell phone and voicemail or they had a house phone and an answering machine. In 2010, we have all sorts of ways to keep in touch, from email and instant messenger services, to phone calls and text messaging. Skype, Twitter, Facebook messaging, I can’t even begin to count how many different ways a person can get a hold of me.
But in spite of the numerous ways we can keep in touch with each other in this day and age, one thing remains: The feeling we get when we hear that noise or when we see that glow illuminating from our screens.
That glow, these days, is right up there with that noise. It’s the glow of a person’s name we have been waiting to find online, an indicator of their current status. Are they available? Are they idle? Are they busy? Red light, green light, slightly orange, but maybe a dark yellow light. Sometimes it’s dim and sometimes it’s so bright, if a person was looking into our dark apartment from outside, they’d think lightning was coming from the ceilings. And when we see it, we walk into it as though it was The Light itself. There they are, we think.
Sometimes, the glow comes with that noise.
We have all types of ways to be alerted to someone calling or messaging us. Scroll through any phone’s options and see dozens of different ring tones, not to mention numerous ring tones of our favorite songs available for purchase. Yes, indeed I was one time so smitten with a woman I changed the ring tone of her phone calls to a certain song I will not name, lest I want to hear the wrath of my boys. And yes indeed she also gave me my own ring tone for whenever I called her. It was all so silly, two adults, acting not like the kids we once were, but the kids of today who spend their little bit of change on things like Top 40 ring tones.
But I tell you, that noise, that song, my phone played when it was her who called was music to my ears. Sometimes, I would even let the song play out a little bit, not because I liked it so much, but because there are few feelings more satisfying than the one we get when the person we want to hear from most in the world finally calls us. It’s a feeling so good, we just want to keep it, because we know the minute we press the Talk button, the feeling is gone. Replaced by a greater feeling (that of said person’s voice), but still, we need a second to enjoy the moment of an honored call. If we have the phone on vibrate, let it shake in our palm just one more time.
Of course, the only reason we enjoy the feeling of that noise is because we have waited so long for it, or sometimes, not long at all. Sometimes, we just waited for an intense five minutes, a five minutes in which we did everything we could do to not make it feel like five hours. We left the phone where it was, and walked around our place, searching for something else to occupy our mind, because we learned a long time ago, a watched pot never boils. So we tell ourselves to watch some television instead, but it doesn’t help, because every single sound the television makes sounds eerily similar to that noise we’re waiting to hear. If we find ourselves waiting too long, if say six minutes (didn’t they say five minutes?) have gone by without so much as a peep from the phone, we change the ringer. Put it on silent, because we don’t want to hear that noise anymore, from anyone. But then, just as soon as we have turned off the ringer, what’s this we feel? A vibration, a call’s coming through.
Wait for it…Wait for it…The screen glows, and here comes the name of the caller. Who is it?
Mom. Dad. Sister. Brother. Best friend we talk to every freaking day.
Damn.
And so it goes. That vibration, that glow, that noise. All of that, never gets old.
Jozen
