Picking Up the Phone
I wrote recently about “the early-morning phone call,” the pit in your stomach when you get it, and the worries you have as you answer the call. Towards the end I wrote of how it’s important “to pick up the phone.” My editor changed “pick up” to “answer.”
He didn’t have to explain: I saw at once—as for the first time—that, of course, today phones don’t rest on receivers that lift up (and thereby connect the line) when we pick up our phone. The image of “picking up” has been superceded by phone calls no longer being on a (literal) line.
What do we pick up these days? We pick up trash (or at least we should, at least our own). We pick up groceries, clothes from the cleaners, and mail from the mailbox. We pick up news from conversations, and sometimes we pick up a cold. These are more literal uses, but already they are sliding into metaphor. We pick up speed on the highway. We pick up the pieces after a difficult event.
Picking up also “opens up” a picture that stretches over time. I hold in my head a picture of picking up the phone from its wall-mounted cradle—something I last did more than twenty-five years ago, although I still have a concrete feeling-memory of the weight of the piece in my hand and the way it curved from my ear to my mouth. I also have a picture of pushing the green button on the screen that happens to be sitting on the desk beside my computer. These are, to me, the same picture, a stretch of time rather than of space. It is a picture of something evoked and unseen, a single picture of talking to someone who is not present and yet is present in voice. It is that sense of talking stretched over decades, a sense of having lived through time. My body still has these memories in its muscles and modes of speaking. I still think of “picking up the phone,” even though I never feel the thing in my hand that stretches from mouth to ear.
I think this sense of time being layered is part of what it means to be human. We have a history, which means we know the past as something that remains part of us, even as (at the same time) we know it is past. In heaven there won’t be need of phones,but when we communicate, it seems to me, underlying our communications will be a sense of choosing to answer, of pushing that green button, perhaps even of lifting the phone to our ear.
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Out & About. I am to preach this Sunday, Oct. 25, at St. Luke’s in Denison (the town in which President Eisenhower was born). The services are at 8 and 10:30, with a class in between that I will lead on what’s good about being born.
Good Books & Good Talk: At the third session on Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov I will introduce and we will discuss Books 7, 8, and 9, in which the father is murdered and Dmitri, after a wild and riotous trip, is arrested. We’ll meet at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas on Sun. Nov. 1, at 5pm in the Great Hall, the seminar running for 90 minutes. Please know that you are welcome even if you missed earlier sessions, and even if you have not yet read the part being discussed.
On the Web. That short piece, “Answering the Early-Morning Phone Call,” gave me the chance to think about why it is important for us to feel the absence of someone who has died. “Every human being is relational.” You can read it here: https://humanlifereview.com/answering-the-early-morning-phone-call/