I don’t know why, but a memory from my early teen years popped into existence.
I had a very dear friend from junior high and we’d been separated due to our family moving out of state. Being an 11 to 13 yr old, our writing skills didn’t extend to postal mail and we lost contact with each other over time.
We’d moved back to the city where my friend and I lived, and I was now old enough to drive my dad’s car. I found my friend’s mom’s number in the White Pages and shakily dialed the number from my parent’s house phone attached to the dining room wall.
This was an era before pocket computers, when appliances hadn’t any intelligence, and the only way to know who phoned you was to dial *69 – if you were affluent enough to pay for the custom service to tell you who just called the house line.
So I dialled, and waited, and a weary female voice answered.
“Hello?”, she asked.
“Um, hi, ah this is John.”, I started shakily. I knew my friend’s mom had answered. She was a single mom of two children who were always getting into mischief. She wasn’t one to make cross. “May I speak with Pat please?” I continued nervously.
“Ah. No. And never call here again.” (Slam-click)
This was also the era when one could literally hear the receiver hit the holding bracket when the person slammed the phone down.
I was devastated. I knew I had gotten into a few scrapes with authority figures with her son in the past, but didn’t think she’d have held it against me so harshly.
Thankfully, as it turned out for me in the end, I wasn’t the person she thought I was. What happened was I had the unfortunate luck of sharing the same name as the ex-boyfriend of my friend’s older sister. Mama bear wasn’t angry with me but was protecting her cub.
Memories are funny things. Someday I’ll find out why this one popped up to say, “Hi”.
Not to worry. I didn’t tell it to never call again, haha