A Phone Call From Bing
It's taken me about twenty-five years to get used to the fact that people no longer use their telephones to talk. We use them to communicate; to stay in touch, mostly by email and increasingly by text messaging. Under normal circumstances, we are able to self-correct for any misunderstandings or crossed wires by simple, ordinary face-to-face interactions.
But, the coronavirus has robbed us of the safety valve of regular in-your-face contact and suddenly the telephone conversation has been dusted off to take its intended place as a way to "visit" people without leaving your home. It's a strange feeling and sort of explains why young people have been avoiding them for so long. It does contain a lot of the ingredients of an old-fashioned long distance call. I'm old enough to remember the excitement that preceded my Mom calling one of her sisters Down Home. The precisionwith which she determined when one of my aunts would be at home. I can almost imagine her dressing for the occasion, substitutiing a skirt and blouse for her usual house dress and removing the curlers from her hair.
And, there was the cost. My parents were painfully aware of any uptick in monthly bills which included the phone and "power". The television was not allowed to be just background noise. It would be years before I was permitted to have a fish tank equipped with a motorized filter. And, tropical fish which required a heating device were beyond the pail.
So, long-distance telephone calls - actually any phone call - was frought with a certain amount built-in self-importance. They existed mainly to impart information: departure times, ETAs. They were often preambles to actual visits.
I suppose it was my generation that reinvented the phone as an extension of our social lives. To our parents' everlasting dismay, we used it to catch up with what was actually happening to our friends when we were not in school. This was crucial to New York teenagers in the 1960s because by the time we reached adolescence we were no longer attending school with the people who lived closest to us. By that time we were all involved in increasingly futile attempts to keep New York City public schools "integrated", mainly by traveling farther and farther out of our "districts". The phone became the way we kept up with homework assigments, traded information about teachers and planned our weekends. By my junior year, I knew enough about Bayside and Queens Village and the upper-middle class neighborhoods surrounding Bell Boulevard that they were like second homes to me.
So, it was like somethiing of a blast from the past when around dinner time I saw my smartphone pulsating with Bing's name. I was almost not even a issue of whether I would take the call or wait until after my meal of macaroni and cheese had popped out of the microwave. Like my mother before me, I put aside everything I was doing and mashed the green telephone receiver symbol as hard as I could.
What followed was about twenty minutes of Dubonnet and tonic prior to my meal. It was pure Bing (and a little bit of Crosby thrown in for good measure.) We talked about everything under the sun. One thing would lead to another. We were trying to fill in the holes left by a text thread that kind of ground to a halt through no fault of our own (although, I take major responsibility for letting it die.) It was so like Bing to woryy that it was something he had "said". And, I think wwe both realized how much we missed having a regular outlet for solving the problems of the worls or for just plain gabbing like magpies.
He is such a dear man. And, Zoom is not a suitable replacement for him.
But, the coronavirus has robbed us of the safety valve of regular in-your-face contact and suddenly the telephone conversation has been dusted off to take its intended place as a way to "visit" people without leaving your home. It's a strange feeling and sort of explains why young people have been avoiding them for so long. It does contain a lot of the ingredients of an old-fashioned long distance call. I'm old enough to remember the excitement that preceded my Mom calling one of her sisters Down Home. The precisionwith which she determined when one of my aunts would be at home. I can almost imagine her dressing for the occasion, substitutiing a skirt and blouse for her usual house dress and removing the curlers from her hair.
And, there was the cost. My parents were painfully aware of any uptick in monthly bills which included the phone and "power". The television was not allowed to be just background noise. It would be years before I was permitted to have a fish tank equipped with a motorized filter. And, tropical fish which required a heating device were beyond the pail.
So, long-distance telephone calls - actually any phone call - was frought with a certain amount built-in self-importance. They existed mainly to impart information: departure times, ETAs. They were often preambles to actual visits.
I suppose it was my generation that reinvented the phone as an extension of our social lives. To our parents' everlasting dismay, we used it to catch up with what was actually happening to our friends when we were not in school. This was crucial to New York teenagers in the 1960s because by the time we reached adolescence we were no longer attending school with the people who lived closest to us. By that time we were all involved in increasingly futile attempts to keep New York City public schools "integrated", mainly by traveling farther and farther out of our "districts". The phone became the way we kept up with homework assigments, traded information about teachers and planned our weekends. By my junior year, I knew enough about Bayside and Queens Village and the upper-middle class neighborhoods surrounding Bell Boulevard that they were like second homes to me.
So, it was like somethiing of a blast from the past when around dinner time I saw my smartphone pulsating with Bing's name. I was almost not even a issue of whether I would take the call or wait until after my meal of macaroni and cheese had popped out of the microwave. Like my mother before me, I put aside everything I was doing and mashed the green telephone receiver symbol as hard as I could.
What followed was about twenty minutes of Dubonnet and tonic prior to my meal. It was pure Bing (and a little bit of Crosby thrown in for good measure.) We talked about everything under the sun. One thing would lead to another. We were trying to fill in the holes left by a text thread that kind of ground to a halt through no fault of our own (although, I take major responsibility for letting it die.) It was so like Bing to woryy that it was something he had "said". And, I think wwe both realized how much we missed having a regular outlet for solving the problems of the worls or for just plain gabbing like magpies.
He is such a dear man. And, Zoom is not a suitable replacement for him.