Tales From Exit 22 by Al Batt

I watched a rabbit eat a marigold.

That hurt.

For years, I’ve planted marigolds around the borders of my garden to keep the rabbits at bay.

Everything changes, including rabbits.

I’d gone to the garden to engage the world and pick a couple of geriatric peppers.

Later that day, I attended the wake of a good man with strong opinions.

A friend was just ahead of me in line.

“I loved him,” he said before taking a deep breath. “But there were things about him that I didn’t like.”

We all have things about us that people don’t like. It has to be that way so they won’t miss us so much when we’re gone.

“He’d bought a cellphone,” my friend added. “It was one of those flip phones. He never learned how to use it. The battery life on it was incredible.”

My cellphone vibrated in my pocket.

After paying my respects, I got into my car and returned a few phone calls on my iPhone. I spoke with a good friend who lives in Wyoming. It was nice to reconnect with him. It was worth having a cellphone just for that.

Our lives change. Rabbits change. Our telephones change. For much of my life, callers never asked me, “Where are you?”

If I answered my phone, they knew where I was. Now they never know. They ask where I am.

I grew up with a rotary dial telephone. I couldn’t take a selfie with it and I didn’t carry it with me at all times. We could never let a call go to voicemail. There was no WiFi. There were no telemarketers or robocalls. They were primitive times. Our phone hung on the wall of our living room. It was an only phone, about the size of a black lab and never left the house. The rotary phone had a disk with finger holes that rotated to match the holes with the letters and digits of a telephone number. The phone wasn’t cordless, so a user was tethered to it. Some people invested in long cords, but there were inherent problems with them wrapping around ironing boards, pets and kids, as well as knocking priceless knickknacks from their proper perches. Our cord managed to tie itself into every knot described in pages 17 through 33 of the book, “How to tie knots for fun and profit.”

I don’t have memories of party lines, but I’ve heard the stories. The party line had nothing to do with the voting tendencies of members of Congress. A party line was a local telephone circuit shared by more than one subscriber. Each subscriber had a distinctive ring, such as a long and a short, two shorts and so on. My father said that his faithful canine companion, Wimpy, recognized the Batt ring and moved toward the phone when he heard it. There was a crank on each phone that was cranked (What else do you do with a crank?) to place a call. There was no privacy in party line communications. Every time someone received a call, the phones rang in all houses on the party line. That might include 20 households. If you talked on the phone, anyone on your party line could pick up their telephone and listen in. That was called rubbering.

Party lines were used as sources of entertainment and gossip, as well as a means of alerting others to fires and other emergencies. If someone on your party line was using their phone, no one else could make a call. If someone had an emergency, they were allowed to break into a call.

I saw an old black-and-white movie recently in which a caller said something like this into a phone, “Operator, give me Tilden 9999.”     

Operators were standing by in those days.

Tilden was an exchange name. Exchange names were used as part of phone numbers and you could tell the general area where a person lived by them.

Local phone companies had a number that people could dial to get the correct time. When a wristwatch needed winding, it helped to know the right time.

No one called us after 9:30 at night. We were early risers. Calls after that time either brought bad news or were wrong numbers. When my mother answered a call in the middle of the night that was a wrong number, she thanked the caller for not being a messenger of hurtful tidings.

It was easy for her to be thankful. Rabbits never ate her marigolds.

Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Saturday.