Party Line

Moments later, my phone rings and I scramble to get to the table in the hall where the phone sits. Or should sit. I have two pre-teens who can never quite grasp the idea that everything has a home and everything likes to go home after work, including the phone, and keeping it in your room where it gets buried inadvertently in a pile of stuffed animals is just mean.

I press the “find handset” button and race about the house, in my socks, sliding along the hardwoods my daughter so lovingly polished with Pledge, finding and turning off the alarm on each handset as it is located. I secretly long for the long, curly cord that dangled precariously close to the toaster from my parents’ wall mounted telephone. Olive green to match the appliances, natch.

I find the phone and see that I have missed a message from the squirrel guy, who is supposed to help me figure out if and how the squirrels are getting into the space between my floors.

Hoping that he’s left a message that he’ll be by that day, I dial into my answering system. (My parents never, ever had one. And they had a little spiral bound address book melting by the same toaster instead of a directory in the phone too. Loved the 70s. Shag hair cuts, Dr. Scholls and inferior technology. How quaint.)

Before Bucky the Squirrel Guy’s message cues up, there is one other.

The message from Mom.

I can tell from the opening “It’s Mom” that this message is not one of her “I put a little something in the mail for you” messages, or her “go onto this website and enter to win a lighthouse” advisories, or even a “I was going through some things and found a letter from you from when you were in college and it made me smile” communiqués. (Are you paying attention, sophomore nephew at college? Send your mother a letter. Not an email, not a Facebook message, not a text. A real honest to goodness letter. Written in your handwriting, not typed and printed. Years from now when you are a successful whatever jet-setting about the globe enjoying the fruits of your labor and unable to make it home for holidays, she will read it and smile knowing it was her sensational works of motherhood that placed your feet on that path, and make her smile. Smile, and reach for the Pinot Grigio.)

I brace myself. This is going to be a howler.