My relationship with phones, in comparison to those around me, is a bit curious. I see others make running dives for their ringing phones but me, sometimes I answer, sometimes I don’t. It really depends on what I’m doing when the phone rings and, more importantly, IF I hear the phone ring.

When I was first introduced to phones, there were no answering machines, voice mail, or caller id. If you didn’t answer the phone, you wouldn’t know who’d called or what they’d wanted. Bottom line: someone had to answer the phone. As a young kid, it was, in fact, a chore. A ringing phone usually prompted my father to say, “someone make that damn thing stop ringing—and tell ‘em I’m not here.” My brother and I would look at one another, violently pointing at the other, and engage in a heated of battle of whispered “it’s not my turn, it’s yours.” This typically didn’t have the chance to elevate to name-calling before my father screamed, “Somebody answer that fucking phone.” My big brother typically won these skirmishes…and I answered the phone. It wasn’t until I learned to lie (“No—he’s not here—they took him off to prison months ago”) that I was relieved of the chore.

And then we became teenagers and a ringing phone became potential proof that someone outside of this bunch of nutjobs in our house might be bestowing some sort of acceptance upon us. My brother and I would run, arms and legs flailing, obscenities flying, in an effort to reach the phone first. If he got there first, as he typically did, he’d grab the receiver, say “hello” and then he’d say something like, “oh she can’t come to the phone right now—she’s in the bathroom popping her zits--she'll be hours in there” and then hang up. I’d punch him and run, run, run. Once he’d caught me and adequately beaten me, I’d start bombing him with, “who was it? Was it a guy? What’d they sound like? Did they say they’d call back?” His usual response was to shrug his shoulders and say, “I think it was a wrong number.” Fucker.

But if I got to the phone first AND the call was for me, you could forget the phone for an hour or two. Back then, I loved the phone, loved it, loved it, loved it. And I stayed on it for great lengths of time, sometimes literally falling asleep to the cadence of, “I don’t know….what do you wanna do?”

It was during one of my marathon sessions that my father, calling from the side of the road, in a thunderstorm, repeatedly getting a busy signal, decided that I needed my own phone line. When the taxi pulled up in the front yard, he marched into the house, rain dripping from his clothes, and grumbled, “after I dry off, SOMEBODY has to take me back to my car to get it towed.” I remember specifically saying, “Why didn’t you call?” and backing up a few feet, thinking the distance might serve as a sufficient buffer from his much-anticipated roar. Standing in the rain apparently had subdued him though, so I was relieved when he only said that he had, indeed, called. Sensing he was too tired to fight, I opted to start my defense for any future battle over the matter-- I said that, hmm, perhaps he’d dialed the wrong number, that I’d been home the whole time, but that I’d be more than happy to drive him back to his car. Playing the role of the doting teenage daughter—almost always effective!

It was just a few days later when I walked in from school and found my mother, standing in the hallway, holding the phone to her ear. That was unusual—nobody EVER called for HER! But then, I heard the phone ring. No—wait—the phone couldn’t be ringing because she was on it—but—what the hell—the ringing was coming from MY bedroom. It only took a flash for me to understand everything and I took off running, ecstatic to find a ringing phone placed in the center of my bed. My mother followed me and, as I was gushing about how this phone was my instant ticket to the world of a fabulous life, she interrupted and said, “All I know is that your father said that if he ever breaks down again, you’re the one who has to go get him. You.”

The deal that had been brokered without my participation was acceptable only momentarily, until I asked for my number so that I could distribute it to my friends and, perhaps, pencil it in on a few bathroom walls. “831-0300? You’ve got to be kidding me? That has three zeroes in it—nobody is ever, EVER going to call me.” It was an absolute tragedy, having cooldom so very tantalizingly close, but just out of reach. My parents had not considered that, with a rotary phone (that was all that there was back then), having such a phone number meant that the caller would have to wait and wait and wait for the dial to circle all the way back from zero three times—my friends and I were at that age when instant gratification wasn’t fast enough—so my new phone number was just a cruel reminder of how cool I could be if I didn’t have such freaks around me, dooming me to geekdom.

Obviously, gratitude wasn’t part of my repertoire back then—I was, indeed, a teenager.

It was until I was married that push-button phones and answering machines became commonplace, which meant, eventually, we, too, owned one of each. By then, a ringing phone wasn’t sufficient for that psychological fix of thinking the world loved us—what was needed was the blinking red light on the answering machine, the one that said to us that we had a message waiting, that indeed, while we were off doing something else, not thinking about the rest of the world, someone out there WANTED us--and the flashing red light was proof of it. But more often than not, we’d come in and race to the answering machine only to find, next to the type that read “Messages received,” a big, fat, red “0.” We’d learned to laugh about it, with me often saying to The X, “Look, honey, all of our friends called.”

And then came the advent of cell phones with built-in caller ID. Oh—you couldn’t hide any longer—I knew you wanted me even when you weren’t able to vocalize it and leave me a message. And that, my friends, was when I came to my current opinion of the phone. It is for me, about me, at my convenience, period. Even though my phone is likely to be shoved in my front pocket, since I have record of your call no matter what, I don’t necessarily answer it. I mean, most of the time, I keep the thing on “silent,” periodically checking it for missed calls. But when I do have the ringer on, I am likely to be listening to music, rather loudly, and so I miss calls that way too—I just don’t hear the thing ring. And now that the urgency of answering the phone has gone away, so has my desire for talking on it. My needs of being desired are fulfilled simply by scrolling through the log of missed calls.

So then, a reasonable person might ask, why the hell do I even own a phone, given that I’m not going to answer it and don’t particularly enjoy talking on it? Well, it is a weapon, a fairly effective defense against the rest of the world.

When I am sitting in a crowd by myself, surrounded by gaggles of gossiping women whose social skills are far more developed than my own, I can lift my cell phone to my ear and pretend to have a rather engaged and lively conversation with one of my ever-delightful yet imaginary friends. If it’s the Junior League types who are within earshot, my end of the conversation typically goes something like this: “Yo….’sup?….just chillin’--you?…Advice? Sure. ’sup?…uh-huh….uh-huh….sounds like a good plan, but what are you going to use to close it up?….STAPLES? NO, NO, NO….listen, bitch, you called for my advice, and I’m gonna give it…no…ok…..did you get a piece of paper?….ok…I’ll wait…ok…ready?...okay, you got a sewing kit?...good...here’s my motto…sutures, baby, sutures….YEP, SUTURES, SOAP AND A SHOP-VAC AND CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES CAN’T PROVE NOTHING.”

If the issue is the guy in the tight shorts that are pulled two inches above his waist with whom I’ve inadvertently made eye-contact, the one who has misinterpreted this as a “come hither” look and who has made his way to the seat next to mine, my end of the conversation usually goes something like this: “Hey Big Daddy….no, you tell me what YOU’RE wearing first…oh jeez...why do you think we have to go over this again?…listen, baby, I’ve practiced and practiced and practiced and I’m going to tell that judge exactly what you told me to say…you know I don’t want you to have to go away again…the babies missed you so much last time.”

And I know it isn’t just me who attempts to look important by talking to my imaginary friends….and I’m not the only one who knows that to get out of anything and everything, one need only feign to talk to a desperately ill child or friend with a flat tire. I just need to work on a script for the phone call I answer when I walk the dog—I keep hearing the guy down at the end of the street has an arsenal of bombs in his basement. I don’t know if I would be inviting or deferring trouble by answering my phone with, “Agent Griffith--go ahead.”