Phone in, phone out

When I was very young, I never had one of those toy telephones, the kind that children play with and sound just like their parents or nannies do. I never picked up a bright plastic receiver, dialled a number on the bright plastic dial, bashed on the bright plastic disconnect button and yelled into the mouthpiece in a bright plastic voice, mimicking what I had seen and heard Mother or Father do. Perhaps that is why I spend so much time on the phone now that I am all grown up, rattling between calls that are for work and calls that are for anything but. And both are a source of not just great loads of information, but occasionally of amusement and, once in a rare while, a lasting connection.

Once upon a time I was hooked on to that dratted instrument. All I did was talk to friends, generally to one friend, and we went on and on about everything and, funnily enough, nothing. She and I went to school together, literally speaking, walking down the hill every morning and back up again every evening. And then we got on the phone and started our hours-long chats. We talked about school and our classmates and teachers and homework and friends and parents and clothes and shoes and books and more. And we always had more to talk about, even after our mothers had pried us off the telephone and pushed us into our rooms to bathe, do assignments and, as a last resort, sleep.

That early addiction led to more serious ones later on, as I grew up. Unfortunately for those who paid the bills, many of my calls were long distance, since many of my friends were in places far removed from wherever I was. So if I wanted to call my best friend, it had to be on the other side of the world, since I was in New York and she was in Mumbai. As I got older, my best friends changed and where we were changed, too. For now, my best friends are in London and Denver, while I am many miles away in my own home city. So phone calls are attenuated and conversations kept basic. Better yet, email does the trick painlessly.

What do you talk about for so long when you get on the phone, my father often demands, with a certain irate tone colouring his normally laughing voice. I cannot explain, since I really don’t know. With Nina it is all about people we know, places we went, food we ate and shopping we should not have done. There are many bouts of giggles and much family news exchanged. In between, there will be a feminine foible or four discussed, health updates made and worries and sins confessed and worried over. Some yelling at each other for stuff done or not done happens, and a little affection crosses the line in both directions. With Karen, on the other side of the world, it is all done much quicker and more rarely, but it still is done, to our mutual satisfaction, once in a while. I have a strange feeling that we are both saving it all up to vent at each other when we meet, hopefully later this year.

Phone calls these days are much shorter, limited to conversations for work, during which I manage usually to sound bored and fed up and very, very snooty, I am told. I want whoever it is to get off the phone as soon as possible so I can get back to whatever I am doing. But when it comes to friends, it becomes a matter of familiar comfort, talking about everything from the weather to the dog’s dinner, what we had for lunch and where we would be after six that evening. This inanity can last hours, or it can be a four-second rush – the intention is to keep in touch, if not literally, at least over a fibre-optic wire.