Brrring

As I was walking out of the record store yesterday, the phone rang. Not my phone, the wireless doohickey, but a real phone, somewhere, with a bell. Then I realized: it was the pay phone outside the shop.

When I was a child I leapt to answer any pay phone that rang, for the sheer unpredictability of it. Like the man used to sing, who can it be now? I also used to write down the numbers of pay phones and then, at home, call them. The reason was the same: something weird might happen. As I recall, what generally happened, no matter what end of the pay phone I was on, was a brief moment of shared confusion, sometimes followed by an even briefer moment of shared amusement. And that was about it.

Those memories raced through my mind in an instant when the phone rang yesterday. I dithered over whether I should pick it up, but it looked nasty, even by pay phone standards. So I kept moving. Pay phones aren't guaranteed to be clean.