If you’re over 30, you remember actually talking on the phone. When I was growing up, phones lived in your house and they were attached to the wall. I probably logged hundreds of hours talking to my best friend on afternoons and weekends when we couldn’t see each other, and I know I put my phone next to me on the pillow once or twice talking late into the night with a high school boyfriend.
There is something intimate about a voice sounding right in your ear (and the solidity and robustness of a wired landline!). I don’t remember thinking about what voices sounded like, particularly, but I do remember that everyone I knew could do two things: rattle off lots of phone numbers from memory, and tell dozens of voices apart on the phone within one or two syllables.
We still talk on the phone, of course, but we have so many other options that young people, especially, just don’t seem to grow up with the same habits I did. They don’t know anyone’s phone number by heart, and they don’t talk, actually talk, to their friends for hours. That sense of intimacy, of a voice speaking only to me, carried across space and into my ears, isn’t replicated by texting or video chat or Instagram.
Lately, a lot of what we take for granted is up in the air. We can’t go the places we would normally go. We can’t count on our grocery stores to have what they usually do on the shelves. We can’t see a lot of the people we long to see. But what I’m finding is that some simpler habits and routines are popping up again. I’m cooking and reading more and multitasking and rushing less.
And yesterday, I talked to my sister, my mom, and my best friend on the phone. It felt good. Simple pleasures.
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