Growing up, I lived in a split-level house. There were five levels if you included the finished basement and the finished attic bedroom. There was one telephone in the house and it was on the middle level in the kitchen. In my earliest memories, it was a Party Line and that meant that other people shared the phone line.

My father didn’t like when my siblings and I used the phone. Maybe it was because of the cost of a phone call? I’m not sure. But as a result, we didn’t use the phone unless it was important. You didn’t just talk on the phone, you did whatever business you needed to do and then you got off the phone. I blame this experience for the fact that I still don’t like talking on the phone. I feel awkward with phone silences and am never sure how to end a phone call without seeming like I have better things to do than talk to the person on the other end. It’s truly not that, it’s just that I don’t have anything else to say and the business has already been taken care of.

Well, there was an exception somewhere between junior high and high school. My parents bought an extended telephone cord and attached it to the phone. When boys came into the picture for me, that extended cord came in handy as I tried to stretch it as far as I could away from the kitchen.

The phone was hung on the wall and at first it was black, but at some point, my mom painted it pink. Mom liked to paint things and then repaint things. One time I came home from school and the shower doors were painted. They had been clear glass with frosted images of mermaids and bubbles. Mom painted over the frosted images with a variety of colors.

Well, I digress, the point of this blog post is that now that I’ve moved away from New York to North Carolina, I find myself feeling guilty that I’m not talking to more people on the phone. I suppose this is a sort of apology to them. If I fail to call you, please call me! I don’t want to lose touch and you mean a lot to me.