Before cellphones and ringtones
By Kiesa Kay

Louisville

I miss my IBM Selectric typewriter and my 33 RPM albums.

I miss having a corner drugstore owned by a real person instead of a corporation.

I miss living in a town where instead of a fire truck with hoses and ladders, we had an orange Volkswagen Beetle with a red light on top - "the Fire Beetle" - and a bucket brigade of volunteers from the lake to the flames.

Most of all, though, I miss the multi-family party line there, in Gardener, Kan. When I was a kid, my family was one of three or more to share a single telephone line.

For awhile, we had a seafoam green telephone on the desk between the bookshelves and the fireplace. When it rang, my father had the annoying habit of saying, "Dingwah, Chop Chop." I never did learn what he meant. Nowadays I suppose we'd call it our personal family ring tone. Sometimes he'd say, "Better get it, might be the telephone." So we had two personalized ring tone choices.

Back then, when our neighbor's cat knocked her phone of the hook, nobody's calls could go in or out on the lake road until somebody went down there, knocked on her door, and asked her to hang the phone back up again.

With a party line, people can pick up and chime in if they have an opinion to share, or eavesdrop. We respected one another for the most part.

Telephones were for business, for emergencies, and any girl going on a date had a dime in her pocket to make a call in case the date went downhill fast. Long-distance calls were costly and rare, and when one came in, everybody had to be real quiet and respectful. Faraway family members called on holidays and each person at the family dinner took a turn swapping a "howdy." Each long-distance call felt like a rare and treasured event for the whole family to share.

I never thought I'd see the day when each child in a family carried a personal telephone. Now my daughter has talked me into a family plan so she and my son can talk to their friends whenever they want to "for free."

She got one of these phones with games and songs downloaded from the Internet, and text messages from her pals, and she can reach anybody any time day or night by pushing a few little buttons. That cute little metal rectangle does everything but stand up and dance the mamba. I inherited her old phone, which was plenty exciting enough for me. It was a time-waster, though; I spent 13 minutes trying to find a song I liked on the ringtone choices, going back down memory lane with "Barracuda" and "Bad to the Bone." I finally settled for "Moon River."

Just when I had every person I'd ever called or who'd ever called me stored in that little piece of metal, it busted due to corrosion. I even lost my "Moon River" ringtone. You'd think in a world where people can dial Thailand without an operator or so much as a fare-thee-well, it'd be simple to fix up that phone - but it wasn't.

After a lot of running around and waiting for help and confusing sales pitches and haggling, I found a store clerk who charged me more for a new phone than any human has a right to ask for a metal rectangle - but she looked friendly doing it.

And I realized then how I missed that party line. It never gave me any false metallic voices telling me to press a number for this or that, and it didn't play my favorite classic rock songs in my ear in strange symphonic versions. It had that human element. I got to talk to the neighbors, and we shared a common bond of annoyance from time to time when that cat did its cabinet dance and kept us all out of reach. Come to think of it, being out of reach wasn't so bad. We had no answering machine, and no electronic tether to anybody who happened to think of something silly to share.

As people spread farther apart to build their lives, instead of living in one small town, they stretch their invisible phone waves to one another to keep in contact. Cellphones have broken some kind of boundary to the brain, creating a brain-to-brain intimacy with computers that replaces actual human contact.

And that thing rings all the time. Sometimes it seems like the only way to get any peace and quiet from other people is to break the cellphone.

Hey, I didn't do it on purpose. I swear.