In search of numbers
My children have never starred in my dreams, probably because they’re always in my waking thoughts. Around the time they left the nest for school, my dreams turned to the worst kind of nightmares: the one where I was hundreds of miles away and couldn’t find my way back to them. I’m glad that dream doesn’t come around any more – or at least that if it does I don’t remember it.
There’s been a weird version of that one lately, a dream in which I’ve lost my phone and now can’t reach my kids or anyone else I need. The latest one has me with a friend at a huge commercial or industrial campus of some kind, and I’ve dropped my phone. And as we retrace our steps (oddly including climbing a ladder onto a steeply pitched roof), I’m mostly worrying that I’ll never speak with my kids, family or friends again.
And that part of it is true. Cellphones have made our visual memory of numbers mostly obsolete.
My phone lists my contacts as photos. Wanna call Grace? There’s a photo of her, taken when she was 13, teary-eyed and mouth agape at a boy band concert. It’s the funniest photo I’ve ever taken of her, and I get to relive that moment again each time I call her or she calls me. Her number? I remember the seven digits, but it is 724 or 412?
Both my children still have the numbers that came with their first little flip phones when they were in middle school, before smartphones opened the portal to the internet. My son’s number is the same, too, but it has a tricky combination of eights and nines, which trip me up in the way adding columns of those numbers do. I rely on his photo when I call him.
Remember rotary phones? Back when the phone on the kitchen wall had a curly cord 30 feet long, allowing the kids to talk while wandering around the house, or in my case, while shut into the piano room? I knew, by heart, at least two dozen phone numbers, including that of my grandparents, various boyfriends, neighbors, many girlfriends, and the farm where I worked.
Maybe the tactile act of putting a finger into the hole in the dial, pulling it around and waiting forever for it to roll back allowed the number to imprint itself into our memory. Fifty years later, I can still tell you the numbers of six good friends, as well as the number of the house where we lived when I was really little.
In my dream, as I scrambled around looking for my phone, I worried that my kids would be trying to reach me. If I knew their number by heart, I could get to a pay phone and call to tell them what was happening. But as in dreamland, in the waking world there are no pay phones. I could have asked my friend to call them.
If only I knew their numbers.
Technology has made us lazy in some ways. The convenience that allows me to tell my car to dial my son while I’m driving might someday send me adrift if I’ve forgotten or lost my phone. What’s his number? Is it a 79 or a 97? And does Grace have a 412 or 724?
And yet, I can tell you the every phone number my grandparents had as long as I knew them. Maybe that’s because I called them all the time, thinking about the number, waiting for that dial to roll back.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.