Saturday, December 19, 2009
10:37 AM
Rotary Phones
The phone we had in our living room looked like this one. Before she became obsessed with red phones, my mom really liked decorating our home with the color aqua. (Much better than her favorite color, red for a house that doesn't charge visitors by the hour, no?) So of course, our phone was aqua, her favorite flower vase was aqua, and after one particularly industrious and productive week of playing single mom while my dad was working out on the road, our living room and kitchen walls were aqua. LOL I have no qualms with that color per se, but she got the shade just a tad dark which made the living room a bit gloomy at times. And then, there was the problem of the kitchen tile. From the floor up, our kitchen had about 3ft of beige and brown tile on the walls. Beige and brown don't so much go with dark aqua. Neither do brown-orange cabinets but hey, when Ginger Bear gets on a creative tear, you don't worry about the details you just roll with it and so that's exactly what we did. LOL
My parents had a black rotary phone like this on the nightstand beside their bed in our house on Madison. The only difference was that the little rotating part through which you placed your finger to dial was a heavy metal, rather than the customary clear plastic. I'm not sure why that was because the living room phone had the clear dialer instead. Maybe the metal one was less expensive and my parents opted for that since it was a second phone. I don't know and I highly doubt that my mom would know either.
We human beings always want whatever is different from that which we already have. Such was the case with the wall phone. For the first 10 or so years of my life, both of the phones in our home were table top phones. So naturally, having seen the wall phones on television and at friend's houses, I very much wanted at least one wall phone. My parents eventually did trade the living room table top phone for a wall phone and I was really happy about that. They also put an extra long cord on it so I could walk across the living room, down our long hall into the bathroom, or into the front part of the kitchen while talking on the phone. That was way before such conveniences as cell phones or even cordless land lines so being able to roam around the house a bit while talking to my friends on the telephone was quite the unique luxury. I could even sit on the toilet while talking on the phone! LOL That was MAJOR because that meant that I didn't even have to hang up long enough to go to the restroom. LOL Of course, I had to be super careful so as not to accidentally let any potty-related noises give away my covert position to the caller on the other end of the line. In Jr. High especially, a thing like that could lead to humiliating nicknames and the raining down of a social hell from which you might never recover. : )