Flashback Friday

Childhood Flashback

One morning before school the girls were playing with some vintage phones that we have. My kids have grown up playing house with them, but I recently added the old rotary phone to the collection. The rotary phone pretty much blew their minds and they couldn't keep their hands off of it. There is something so tactilely satisfying about these old phones...all the button pushing and dialing. The girls played for quite awhile with these phones, all the while talking in English accents, because apparently that is what you do when playing with "antiques". Very cute.

You know how you have muscle memory? My fingers apparently have dialing memory. One touch of that old rotary phone and I was dialing my grandparents phone number in Provo, Utah. Ask me what their old phone number was and I doubt I could just rattle it off, but my fingers remembered and happily dialed away. Crazy. Pushing the buttons on the pink phone and my fingers could remember all kinds of phone numbers thought long forgotten. Sometimes I miss using those old heavy phones, twisting the cord around in my fingers, stretching it nearly beyond it's capacity to stretch, and I dearly miss those sweet voices who can no longer answer my call.

When I was a teenager I talked and talked on the phone to my parents great annoyance. So much so that our parrot Maxwell Alexander Ferdinand the Bird would screech "Kristin!!!" every time the phone rang. People trying to call for my parents would get an endless busy signal. Remember those days? To solve this problem my parents installed a second line in our house to deal with the high call volume of their teenage daughters. It was thrilling!! I remember telling people "If you want to call me and my sisters this is OUR phone number." It felt so glamorous and sophisticated. Now even my 10 year old has her own phone number. Ha ha. So much for sophistication and glamour. In our house in Springdell, "our phone" sat on a little desk in the nook by the window in the hallway outside our bedrooms. When that thing would ring three girls would race for it! It was so exciting. That cord was all stretched out from it being pulled into our bedrooms and bathroom. When we moved to Kansas City, the phone and our private line was installed in my bedroom...by then a CORDLESS phone...I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Don't even get me started on the joy I felt when my high school boyfriend, Aaron, bought me my very own answering machine...complete with he and his brother Nate's own custom Hans and Franz message on it. "Hello! We are Hans and Franz and we are here to pump you up! But if you are calling for Kristin, Stacey, or Kelley they are not here so LEAVE A MESSAGE! Unless you are a girly-man and then you better hang up right now!..." and that's all I remember. Ha ha!!

It is so funny that my children VERY rarely chat on the phone. They text constantly or occasionally face time with their friends but when their phones do ring and someone is actually calling to TALK to them they get a weird look on their faces like "What do THEY want?!" I admit sometimes I do that too. How times have changed!!

PS...Maxwell the parrot is still alive and well and screeching my name in Kansas City. I love it.