Phone and Quiet

Well... my phone is gone. If you know me well or call me often, you most likely know that my phone is often gone. But in wonderfully short spurts that resolve after I've retraced my steps in my head a few times.

This time, though, on day 3, I'm pretty sure my phone is gone for good. Could this be? This has never happened to me before. And lots of things have happened to me with phones, like my phone has flown off the roof of my car while I was driving, smashed onto the pavement, broken into pieces and then lived to tell about it without a hitch. My phone has fallen into the ocean and has come back to life with a little blow-dryer love. My phone has been dipped into a cup of water and -- well, it actually died that time, but at least Verizon replaced it. There just is no saving a phone that has vanished...

The worst part is that I can trace the disappearance to Saturday between 2PM, when I was making peach jam, and 4PM when I went out for a drink with Ben. What happened in that window? The mystery.

I've concluded that Eden, who will hold my phone between her ear and shoulder like a multi-tasking adult and carry it around for long periods of time, stashed is somewhere that my brain has thus far been unable to imagine. At least makes me feel better to imagine that she is responsible. However, I do have a nagging sense that it was I who put it somewhere... But that's where the hunch stops.

This morning, I (obviously) had no cell phone. My house phone (a piece of crap from Woot! whose battery literally dies after 2 1/2 minutes of use) died. All 3 handsets. And my Internet was down. Down in the worst way where it worked perfectly until I pressed send, at which point it was irreparably down.

Technology is not for me (as in not cheering for me). This is a good thing to remember. Because though I'm often devoted to it, technology has no loyalties and no love.

Though I've had to coordinate plans in advance and wait in parking lots wondering if the plans would materialize without last minute changes, resist shooting off texts, or calling people the second I think of something I want to ask, there has been a little more room for quiet the last few days.

Remember quiet? I don't. But I'd like for it to be a part of my life again. Which is perhaps why all my technological addictions collapsed at once, to make a little room, since on my own, I seem scarcely to stop. So we'll see. We'll see...


A poem by Pablo Neruda to read when you pause:


Keeping Quiet


Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let's not speak any language,
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn't be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren't unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,
if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I'll go.