Rotary Phones

I have almost always owned a rotary phone.  Having seldom been without one, I do not see it as some retro technology.  I merely see it as a phone.  I like the act of dialing a number.  Sure, it's easy simply to jab your finger at a name and have the cell phone place the call, but the act of dialing, and the sound of the dial ratcheting back into place is soothing and sets the mood for the phone call.

Of course, if the call itself is not soothing, you can always slam down the handset.  You should not do that with a cell phone.

When I was growing up, we had a black rotary phone on a metal phone table in a corner of the dining room.  One of my earliest memories is of my mother using the phone, and of my peering into the dining room to make sure she was still thus occupied, while I marched down the hall with my toys, in order to stuff them into the toilet.  Why I was stuffing them into the toilet, I have no idea.

The telephone table had a lower shelf, where the telephone book lived, along with a few pencils and some note paper.  I remember my mother was prone to doodle while she talked on the phone, and I would look at her drawings from time to time.  I wish that I still had some of them.

 I loved to dial the phone when I was a small boy.  I did, of course, have the Fisher Price toy phone, whose eyes rolled up and down while you pulled it.  Dialing the actual phone, however, was a bit of magic, a bit of control over the world.  I would often call the number for the time, though of course there were clocks in the house. Were they right though?  That's something I could check via telephone.  I don't know if any of those numbers still exist - phone numbers for time, phone numbers for weather.

That black rotary was eventually replaced by a wall mounted push button phone, but when I moved out of the house, rotary phones were cheap and abundant in thrift stores.  They seldom wore out, but when they did, you could usually get another one at a thrift store for five dollars or so.  The phones that were available new in stores became lighter and more fragile.  The rotary phones in the thrift stores had more heft to them - fewer features, well, no features really, but more durable.

The availability of cheap thrift store rotary phones dried up about the time my first child was born, in the late nineties.  We still had a thrift store rotary phone at that time, but it eventually stopped functioning.  We replaced it with a touch tone phone, but it lacked the feel of the older phones.

At some point, we got rid of our land line, as many people were doing at the time.  We were not, however, happy with the choice.  Our DSL line was cheaper than paying for phone service and a DSL line, but not that much cheaper.  Plus our cell phones - well, you know how bad cell phones are for actually speaking on.  They seem to be somewhat better now, but they're still not the same.

I also found that I stopped calling friends who got rid of their landline, there were too many times I called to chat with someone, and they said, "I'm at the grocery store right now, I'll call you back"  Sometimes they were driving, or out for a walk, or waiting in a doctor's office.  I felt like I was intruding in their life in a way I didn't feel when they picked up their landline.  I simply stopped calling.  When I call someone, I like to picture their phone, in their house, on their telephone table, ringing.  "Should I answer it? Or just let the machine get it?" I picture them thinking.  If they answer it, I feel they are welcoming the conversation.  There phone is there on the table.  They have a chair at the table, possibly a pad of paper, and a pencil with which to doodle while they talk.

Our lives without a landline did not last long.  We went through a couple of Ebay rotary phones that weren't quite operational and cost far more than I expected to pay.  We had to buy a pulse-to-tone converter, because it seemed like our DSL line did not play well with rotary dialing.  Our current phone, as pictured, was a gift from my sister.  Coupled with my Google Voice number, I can place long distance calls to family without incurring long distance charges.  My mother-in-law likes to call my wife, and I get to listen to half of the conversation while she sits at the telephone table, and I am cooking dinner in the kitchen.

It's marvelous to have a phone that is just a phone, at a table.  When I speak to you on the phone, you can be assured that I am sitting there, listening and not doing anything else, except, perhaps, drawing with a pencil on a pad of paper or in the margins of the phone book.