The phone is ringing

We have five phones that sit on stands or can be taken off and used separately. I also have a small phone I can carry. It has a different number and the ring sounds different also. My iPod can be used as a phone as well, if I can ever figure out how to do it.

It sounds like I have many nice ways to send or receive messages or pictures. Not so. First I can never tell which phone to answer, and the ones that rest on a stand only ring three times before it stops. Unless I am sitting right on one of these phones I can’t get to my walker, move to the phone and answer before I hear it go dead as I try to say “Hello.”

I remember back when Nevada first started using dial phones. An operator called and had each member of the family go through the routine of placing a call. “Remember you have to let the dial go all the way back to the little curved stopper before you start to put in another number.” It seemed a confusing project to learn at first.

Of course that was soon replaced with the Princess phone and other different styles. We were feeling very modern since it hadn’t been too long since we merely told ‘Central’ who we wanted to speak to.

My father told me about how they got their very first phone. It was attached to the kitchen wall and the earpiece was hanging on a hook on the side of the wooden phone. In order to use this phone the neighbors worked together to cut down a certain number of poles to string the telephone wires on. We were on a party line with about six other families in the Ellis community.

Each family was to cut down enough young trees to provide the number of poles needed to go from the Halcomb house down what is now Panama Road to Cedar Lawn and then to our kitchen at The Wayside. When they met to start putting the poles in place, one neighbor confessed that “when I get the two I’m after, then I will have three poles to bring!”

Our ‘number’ was two shorts and a long which we cranked out on a handle on the side of the phone. We could each hear the others’ rings and could pick up our own receiver to keep up with the neighbors’ news. If we needed to call farther away than our line we called Central in Moundville and asked to be connected to other neighbors who were not on our line.

My older sisters were amused when an elderly woman who sat next to her mounted phone where she could reach it easily. She told my sisters that she was tired that day because there were so many calls on the phone and she, of course, had to listen in to each one.

In an emergency there was a prolonged ring for everyone to listen to find out that a barn was on fire, or a neighbor had died. Everyone then would respond with help, food, or helped pass the word to another party line.

It wasn’t the fanciest system but it surely kept the families in the neighborhood close together and when we later changed to the earlier mentioned dial phone, we didn’t know as much about each other’s needs as we had in the earlier days,

Now with the equipment I have I should be able to summon help quickly. However, if I was the one in an emergency, I would be too flustered to figure out which phone to use, and remember the numbers and not cut off a conversation in my hurry.

I wonder if Alexander Graham Bell must wonder at the conversations that take place on his invention, Sometimes it might still be the simple, “I need you.”