Even if you unscrewed the antenna, mom’s cell phone couldn’t fit into her glovebox. When she was in the car, it had to go under the passenger seat. When she wasn’t traveling, it stayed in the house. Likely off. It was simply kept for the situations when she needed to make a phone call and was in the country and there was no other option. 

Back in the 90’s, most public spaces had a payphone where you could make a phonemail for a quarter. Or, if you were my friend Jeremy, you could save the quarter, dial 1-800-COLLECT, and put your message in the introduction. 

“Will you accept a collect call from ‘can we get a ride?’”

His parents would not accept the call but they would know the voice and know that we were still at school at orchestra practice. 

If you called our house and we didn’t pick-up the phone – you’d get our freestanding tabletop cassette-tape driven answering machine.

If you called my grandparents, even after 2000, all you could do was make a determination of how many rings you were going to accept before you believed that they just weren’t home. 

They finally got an answering machine around 2005 or so. I can still recall the only message that they ever recorded – not ‘thank you for calling,’ or ‘you’ve reached so and so’ – just the acceptance of surprise that family and old friends would have having actually gotten past the final ring. 

“We’ve finally joined the 21st century; please leave your name and number….”

I don’t remember leaving too many messages with my grandparents. I think my grandmother must have reached out to me often enough that I didn’t have to.

I remember telling her that my college girlfriend and I had driven out to LA to see the last show of a band at the Silverlake Lounge. The staff was nice enough to not card her as she was just 20 and the entry age to the bar was 21. and the band (who knew us) were like ‘well fuck, you actually drove the fuck out here? don’t you have school?’ 

The trip blew all the money I had for that semester even having done the whole trip in two days to save on hotels and time off of work and class. The cops didn’t want to ticket a busty, blonde-haired / blue-eyed woman for driving 95 mph on the interstate but they did want to search her Ford Escort wagon to make sure that her black boyfriend wasn’t running any drugs. 

I wasn’t. 

I didn’t have a therapist at the time so my retired therapist of a grandmother was the best option that I had. She told me not to tell my parents that story and to this day I haven’t. 

Not too many months after that, I got a call from my grandmother through labored breathing. She was in the hospital and retaining water as her organs shut down. I just cried. She told me not to worry and that she would be at my university graduation in June.

She never made it to my graduation. I never went to my graduation. My grandfather told my family that he wasn’t going to the funeral.

I suppose that he knew that they had bought a shared plot and he didn’t want to see it half-full any more than he wanted to be in a half-full bed back home.

I did graduate eventually but it didn’t feel like it was supposed to which is why I just left town and had my diploma mailed home. Flying back to campus, I had touched down and drifted out to sea.

When I called the house, I could still get her voice “We’ve finally joined the 21st century…”

I probably left a message but I probably couldn’t get any words out.