Call Me!

There are four phone numbers from my youth that are still firmly lodged in my memory bank. All of them are just seven magical digits, you didn’t have to dial the area code back then.

My first memorable phone number was in Brampton, when I fell in love with phone chatter as a 10-year-old girl on the cusp of becoming a teenager.

The next phone number, the one around the longest, was the one Bell gave us when my family landed in East Garafraxa. In the minky black nights of life on a farm, the phone was sometimes all there was.

The next one was the coolest. Entirely composed of 7s and 8s – it rolled off my tongue. I didn’t get to be the giver of this number. It was my parents’ when they moved for a time to Fergus. Best number ever!

And finally, going way back in the archives, my grandparents’ phone number in Toronto. Probably the first number I ever dialled on my own.

Each of those  phone numbers was a connection to the outside world. They came rushing back to me when I was doing some cleaning recently and found a tiny leather address book. My Aunt Diane gave it to me around the time I was dialing from that first Brampton number. The book was about the size of a deck of cards, and was from Roots! I remember she gave me a tank top from Roots at that time as well, and I painted my green binder with the Roots logo, using Wite-Out. The epitome of Canadian cool.

Before I opened the little creaky leather book, I tested my memory for those numbers. Could I still remember them? I could. They were lyrical to me. Back then, it was a feat of memory to remember your friends’ numbers or memorize your boyfriend’s number (even before he knew he was in your book with stars and hearts beside his name).

Dialling the old rotary phones was deliciously anticipatory – waiting for the long whirrrrrrrr as the higher numbers were dialled and generally cursing the phone numbers containing eights and nines! How impatient we were to get through, our pencils ready above the circular slot of the next number so we didn’t rough up our nails. And then, sometimes, surprise! Voices on the party line you shared with your rural neighbours. “Hang up until we’re done our conversation!” “Oh, okay!” – and then pretending to hang up, but eavesdropping until the dog barked in the background and you were called out for listening.

Later, when tech improved, the rotary phone changed in most households to a 12-button key pad. Fun and funky phones of the ’80s and ’90s were turquoise, pink, translucent like the Swatch watches of the day, or lit up with very large buttons suitable for an MTV veejay calling Max Headroom. It was fun and exciting when new phones came out in new styles. Tech became smaller and more portable, and phones with twirly long cords were in every room of the house. No more party lines, but now it was brothers and sisters who said, “Get off the phone!” And whom you eavesdropped on, holding your breath outside their rooms.

Finally phones became cordless. Big clunky things at first with antennas that always seemed to break off or become unscrewed and lost. But in general, they worked. Freedom in the household! And freedom to lie out under the stars and cry to your best friend as you scratched out his name and hearts and stars in your tiny address book.

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Now my son, Adrian, has his own phone and has since he started walking to school on his own. I don’t regret one minute of making sure he has this way to connect. I think back to those times when my friends were everything, and ducking under the stairs with the cord stretched to its max to make a quick secret call got me through the night more than once. What we would have given back then to have access to friends and family any time we needed them.

During the pandemic in particular, I know that Adrian’s connection to others via his sleek phone has been essential for mental well-being. Do I worry about the things I don’t know about on his phone? Absolutely. But I have to trust that, just as I was responsible about using the dial pad to boost my friendships, make plans, raise the alert when someone was in trouble, he is too.

While looking through my little leather book, I see plenty of numbers long since obsolete in my life  – the local taxi company, the chicken and ribs place where my friend worked, the school attendance line. I see a few names of friends I wish still spoke to me, whom I could pick up the phone and call, and a few names of boys who were also special to me. Little stories curl up in the air in front of me as I flip through the tiny pages. I can’t bring myself to throw out this relic of my roots, this ancient book of codes from the past.