Call Me

“Where are you?” I ask. “It sounds like you’re walking.”

She is, my friend says, and did she tell me yet about what happened to her the other day? I daydream as we talk, create the world she’s standing in, bring her into mine. I hear an elevator ping six thousand miles away, and a door opens and we both step out of the elevator even as she sits beside me on my couch.

Strange

How a phone call can change your day

Take you away

Away

From the feeling of being alone

Bless the telephone

-Labi Sifre, “Bless the Telephone.”

I could fall in love on the phone, I think.

The silences, the rhythm, the clatter of someone doing dishes as they talk. The way my imagination creates what I can’t see.

Maybe that’s why “Love is Blind,” the reality show where people date through a wall, unable to see each other, and fall in love by voice alone, is so intriguing.

Of course, that show’s not happening over a phone - if it was, millennials and the younger generations might never sign up for it.

According to one English survey, “a quarter of Gen Z and Millennials have never answered a phone call,” which (and I mean this), completely boggles my mind.

Don’t they know what they’re missing? Haven’t they ever watched the scene in “When Harry Met Sally,” where Harry and Sally lie in their beds talking on the phone while watching Casablanca, and felt the urge to call a friend?

Haven’t they - to cite another Nora Ephron gem - ever watched Sleepless in Seattle and, in the scene when our cozy telephone queen Meg Ryan talks to Rosie O’Donnell from her hotel room, wished that for just a moment they could curl up in those comfortable silences?

Maybe the secret lies in the simplicity. The stripped back magic of it. In an age of overwhelming technology and the miscommunications that come with an abundance of communication, there’s something so basic about the phone. Just two people and their voices. No staring at your own image in the corner, no hoping they don’t see the pile of laundry on your bed. No frantic rush to put a bra on before answering the call.

“The Call” – Seamus Heaney

Hold on,’ she said, ‘I’ll just run out and get him.

The weather here’s so good he took the chance

To do a bit of weeding’.

So I saw him

Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,

Touching, inspecting, separating one

Stalk from the other, gently pulling up

Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,

Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,

But rueful also…

Then found myself listening to

The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks

Where the phone lay unattended in a calm

Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums…

And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,

This is how Death would summon Everyman.

Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him.

What is it that’s so vulnerable about a person’s voice? So intimate about the sound of their breathing, so nostalgic about their laugh? Voices I love, or loved, or may come to love. I’ve been brought to tears by a simple “hello.”

A few years ago, while visiting my hometown, an old friend called me. Someone I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years, who I had loved, whose voice I once could’ve picked out of a crowd. It was dark and I was standing on top of a hill to get phone service. I remember not knowing what to expect.

“Hey,” he said, and suddenly I was seventeen again.

“It’s so weird to hear your voice again,” one of us said. “Weird, but wonderful.” And we dusted off the sounds we used to share, our silences, our sighs, our laughs, and made them new again.

Tonight, I’ll call a friend and for a moment, before we settle in, I’ll savor the sound of a voice I know as well as my own.

“It’s nice to hear you say hello,” Labi Siffre sang.

Oh, the sweetness of a voice from your permanent collection.

Bless the telephone, indeed.

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