Calling Home

Since I moved out of my parent’s house 10ish years ago, I’ve never had a “home” phone, only a mobile. In that time, I’ve had 5 or 6 phones, and 3 different numbers. I’ve always been pretty good at having Sprint transfer my contacts, or using Google to back them up. Among the ever growing number of contacts was my parents home number, the land-line number to the house that I grew up in. It has always been in there as “Home,”  and there were separate entries for my Mother’s and Father’s mobile numbers, “Mom” and “Dad” respectively.

My wife and I have been together, counting dating, most of those ten years since I left home.  She is listed under “Jennifer Lynch” and “Kittun”. This March, we found out that she is pregnant. In order to try to get some of our finances in order, we decided to sell our house. It was not our first home together (we have lived in apartment homes all over Atlanta, in NYC and Providence,) but it was the first home that we owed, the first property that had our names on the title. Still, we never had a home phone, a shared landline number. When filling out documents, whoever was holding the pen or typing on the keyboard would put her or my mobile number in the “Home” blank – it probably makes for a quintessential definition of the “postmodern home.”

At any rate, we are currently in another apartment, another temporary home, until we get another house.

We used the money we made from selling our house to pay off some debts, buy my wife a new car, and get me a new cell phone. All my contacts transferred just fine: “Jenifer Lynch/Kittun”, “Mom”, “Dad”, “Home,” etcetera, etcetera.

When we moved, we had to transfer all of our utilities, and the cable company convinced my wife to add a home phone to our bundle in order to save some money. I thought this was a good idea, because as someone who does contract work, I could get a fax machine and start writing off a portion of our rent/mortgage as a home office.

A couple weeks went by, we got settled into our new place, and decided that there’s not quite enough space for a fax machine, so the landline went unused. At the same time, we had both been experiencing poor reception in our apartment, so I started thinking that we should maybe get a phone to plug into the wall.

This past weekend, Jennifer and I took a 350 mile round trip to visit all of our parents. We met each set at a different location; at the lake, at the house, at the stadium. We were able to stay in touch, make and change plans, and get directions by using our mobile phones.

While at my parent’s house, I asked my mom if they had any old phones they weren’t using. She listed all the ones lying around their house, to which I responded with a wishy-washy, half-hearted rejection. On a whim that evening, she picked up a $10 corded-phone while running an errand to the office supply store. It was perfect.

When we got back to our apartment, we unpacked our stuff, started the laundry, and took showers. Tonight, relaxing down into my current home, I decided to plug our new phone into the wall to see if it would actually work. (And to find out what our phone number is.)

After hooking it up, I picked up the receiver and heard a noise I hadn’t heard in a long time, a dial-tone. For my first test, I pushed the buttons to call my mobile phone, and recalled how as a teenager, my friends and I would try to play pop songs with the different key tones. Within seconds, my cell phone rang. I had a silly thought that this would be a good opportunity to have a talk with myself.

Then I really realized something. What label was I going to give this new number in my cell phone “contacts?”

Maybe it’s not as big of a deal as I have made it, but knowing that this new number would stick with me at least as long as I continued living in the Atlanta area, it would need a name…

I went to my “contacts” folder on my mobile phone as if I was walking through a wormhole. I first went to the contact “Home.” I clicked “Edit,” and changed the name to “Grandma and Papa,” the name my nephews and nieces, and soon my little baby girl, call my parents. I then went back to my call history, selected my new landline number, and added it to my contacts as “Home.”