telephone line

John and Telly are at my house today for coffee and a disagreement.  Toby lets me know this is an opportunity for him to catch up on his cat-napping.  So he steps away to let my friends and I be human for a while.

“You really should get one of these,” John says, brandishing his new iphone.  “It’s like having a computer in your pocket.”

“I like to keep my pockets empty so I have a place to put my hands,” Telly says.  “If something comes along that needs computing, I still have my original equipment.”  He taps his ninety-two-year-old head.

“A smartphone doesn’t replace your original equipment.”  John is laughing now.  “It enhances it.”

Telly lifts the fedora out of the seat beside him and puts it on his head.  “This all the enhancement I need.”

“Look.”  John holds his phone in front of him and scrolls through screens of candy-colored apps.  “My whole life is in here.  My contacts, my Kindle app, my Instagram and Facebook.”

“What about the phone part?”

“Yes.  And a phone part.”

“No, I mean how good is the call quality?  Can you understand people on that thing?”

“Mostly.”  John looks at me to stop surfing Tik-Tok for kitten videos and help him make his case.

“It’s an impressive piece of technology that has given everyone with obsessive-compulsive-disorder—like our host—a new outlet.”  Telly holds up his hand when John’s cheeks and brows start bunching with indignation.  “I understand what a marvel it is.  I really do.  But I am quite content with the last generation of technology.”  He points to a niche in my kitchen wall wherein an old-school phone is nesting.  I am one of those who straddle the generations of technology.  Like Telly, I appreciate a phone call free of static and mumbling.  But don’t take my Tik-Tok.  “I have seen almost a century’s worth of one technology replacing the old,” the old guy says.  “You are not going to get a better call quality than analogue.”  

But John is ready with his rebuttal.  “Can Loch carry on a conversation with a rotary phone while he drives from home to the store?  That,” he points to the phone niche.  “That thing keeps him in one place like a dog on a chain.”

“If you are inclined to use your phone while driving,” the nonagenarian says calmly, “you and your car should be kept on a chain.”

“Can he tweet on his landline phone?”

“No!”  Telly roars with laughter.  “It’s a phone.”

On cue, the old analogue phone rings, something it seldom does.  I give out the landline number only to those I care to understand. 

I lift the receiver out of its cradle, and before the first hello, I can hear what sounds like a locomotive clamoring through a windstorm.

“Hello?” 

I hear nothing but a raging storm.

“Hello?” I try again.

“Loch, eh’abby.”  Like that chained dog, subjected to a downpour of human words, all I can make out is my name.

“Who is this?” I ask.

“Tabby!”  The caller finally makes herself clear.  Tabby is my next-door neighbor, eight years into a fraught relationship with parents in Information Technology who are still searching for the admin and about files on their late-model daughter.  “…need help!” she says.

I feel a twinge of panic.

The phone’s long spiral cord lets me walk as far as the window over the kitchen sink.  I look out at the house next door, but it looks perfectly normal.  “At you at home?” I ask.  “Where are you?”  I can hear a loud banging inside a larger volume of sound.  Possibly high winds.  Or big machinery.  I look behind me at John and Telly, whose coffees are on mid-air pause as they sense my budding concern.

“Talk to me,” I say and walk to the porch doors in the living room.  The heavy coil of telephone line that connects phone to wall drops to the floor as it accommodates my peripatetic proclivity.  “Tabby?”  I listen hard.  The call quality on the old phone is crystal clear, but the thing I am listening to is anything but.  “Have you fallen overboard in a typhoon?  Are you and your brother dueling with vacuum cleaners?”

“What is it?” John asks me.  He and Telly follow me to the porch door, through which we can see outside a calm sunny day. 

“Maybe it’s just a bad connection,” Telly says.  But he knows better.  This is, after all, reliable analogue technology. 

“Are you hurt?” I ask.  John looks at me and shakes his head. 

I open the porch doors to give myself more room.  John and Telly tip-toe in place as the phone’s bundled coil slithers past their feet, out the porch door, and out of the house. 

“Tabby, is anyone with you?” I ask.

“…can’t do this much longer,” the kid says in a moment of clarity.  “…driving me…” 

I walk away from the house as I try to recall my empathy training from work.  The person leading the class suggested that sympathy is a telephone line that spans the divide between employee and customer.  Empathy, on the other hand, eliminates the divide to the degree that one can put themself in the other person’s place. 

I figure it should work outside the office as well.   

So I do my best to put myself on the other end of the call.  I ask myself to understand what the young girl is going through.  Where she is.  What is happening.  As my mind divines the target, my body feels the chain-and-sprocket jerk of Life taking us steadily uphill.     

There is a sudden drop in temperature.  “Tabby, what’s happening?”

I look up into the blue sky where a dark cloud is taking shape. 

On the ground, fallen leaves begin to stir.

There is a cry or a laugh.  Maybe a scream.  I can’t tell. 

“Tabby!”  My empathetic stomach pulls the caller’s panic into me.  Anything could be happening.  Something always does.

My stress level sores.

“Loch!” Telly calls from the porch steps.  “Get back here.”

A shadow falls over my house and friends, even as I turn. 

“Now!” Telly demands.

Over the phone, all I can hear is the howling of wind, the crashing of surf, the erratic pounding of what sounds like buildings collapsing about a little girl who reached out to me for help. 

At once, my feet leave the ground.

“LOCH!” John shouts.

The storm on two ends of a phone call lifts me above friends and over my house.  Into the darkening sky.  Static stress crackles in the air and calls the hairs on my neck and arms to attention.

Far below me, the last of the cord spins out, just as John and Telly grab hold of it.  The phone’s base drops as I clutch the receiver with both hands, uncertain now which end is which.  “I know it looks bad right now,” I shout, trying to reassure Tabby.  “But we can get through this.” 

My body wheels in a circle like a kite in a hurricane, no doubt exactly what my eight-year-old neighbor is going through.   

“Hang up the phone,” Telly calls to me. 

“She needs someone to understand,” I shout back.

John has both his legs wrapped and braced within the iron railing beside my porch steps.  He is holding one leg of Telly while the rest of Telly sways in the air above his head.  The earth-bound side of the telephone line is wrapped around the old guy’s hands, the only two hands holding me back from the vortex churning above. 

And I see more.

There is a third human anchor dangling from Telly’s other leg.  Tabby, the very person I am supposed to be having a conversation with.  Her legs scissor back and forth without a firm ground connection.

“Stop flying around,” the kid sings out.  “I was just washing my shoes in the washing machine.”

“What?”  I am sure I heard wrong.

“Confound-it, Loch!” Telly cries.  “You are empathizing with a house appliance!  Get back down here!”

She’s safe, I tell myself.  Tabby’s okay.  But I have started something I cannot stop.  The past two years of covid alerts, lockdowns and toilet paper shortages have given me plenty of practice in responding in all the wrong ways to Life’s stressors.  Quite without intention, I have raised worry to a fine art.  Now, by virtue of that art, I am inextricably bound by my own masterpiece.  It is too strong.  My grip is weakening.

And then I see him. 

My one-cat calvary is hardly a ball of fur as he travels up the phone line like a master of the high wire.     

Toby runs the line, leaps from the phone’s swinging base and catches my shoulder.  Without a meow, he throws himself across my head and reaches his forepaws under my nose.  He tightens his body, stronger than the tides of wind.  And he begins to purr.  Not the gentle armchair purr I know, but a mega-watt pulsing that breaks up my worried thoughts. 

In seconds, I can feel the vortex above us losing momentum.  This allows John and Telly to reel us in before I get another call.   

“What was that?” John asks the moment I have both feet on the ground.   

“I should have let go,” Telly says with a tad of disgust.

“I couldn’t help it.  I was worried.”  I turn to Tabby.  “About you.”

“Why?”  Tabby pretends to be all-innocent.  “I was just washing my shoes.” 

“And you called to tell me that?”

“I was bored,” she says.

“She was looking something more entertaining than spinning sneakers,” John says to me.  “And she found it.”

“You know,” Telly says to John, “if she had called him on his cell phone, we would have lost him.” 

“Are you about to argue that its anchor to the wall gives the analogue phone an advantage over a smart phone?”  John scoffs.  “Seriously?”

“I’ll prove it,” Telly says.  “Tabby go put your shoes in the dryer now and call Loch on his cell phone.”

“No more calls.”  I hold up my hands.  “Not today.  This empathy is powerful stuff.”

Telly nods his fedora.  “It’s usually practiced between two biological self-aware life forms.  Just saying.”

“Imagine how much understanding people could achieve if they used it responsibly,” John piggie-backs.

“Seriously,” I say.  “I wonder if I should report this to HR.  This sort of thing wasn’t covered in their empathy class.”

“Of course, it wasn’t covered,” John says.  “For most people, it isn’t a thing!” 

“Can we do it again?” Tabby asks brazenly.

“Yes it is a thing and no we can’t do it again.”

“Everyone’s right,” Telly announces.

“About what?” I ask him.

“Empathy is powerful, empathic links between man and machine are not a thing, and we should strive to do it again.  Maybe not quite what we just witnessed.”  He points up and moves his finger like an astronaut stirring his weightless mocha in space.  “But real empathy is both healing and preventative.  Just think, if we could really put ourselves in someone else’s shoes—”

“As opposed to putting ourselves in touch with the shoes….”

Telly nods patiently at John.  “If we could really empathize with others, we would be less likely to fight with them or oppress them.  It’s more than a customer service trick to keep people buying your product.”

“Amen,” says John, the former paster among us says.  “And don’t think it’s as easy as just listening to somebody complain.  You have to forget yourself in the moment and put that person first.”

“Did Loch put our washing machine first?” Tabby asks incredulously.

“For the purpose of this conversation only,” Telly says as he frowns at me, “I will say yes.  But I hope he never gives me a reason to say that again.”

“I don’t know,” I tell them.  “Right now I’m in touch with three coffees back in the house, feeling cold and neglected.”

“I guess I can allow that.”  Telly smiles from chin to brow.

John opens the screen door for us to go back in. 

“Me too,” the kid says.  “I want to see how high Loch goes when he puts his coffee first.”

“Great,” I moan at the center of attention.  “All right, Toby.”

Telly stops me then when I raise my hands to take the cat off my head.  “Why don’t you wait until you’re inside…with a ceiling over your head.”

Calm and collected, under care of a cat.