On Picking Up the Phone

What we lose when we stop hearing one another's voices.

My grandmother was slow to adapt to technology. In the early 2000s, when email became commonplace, she rejected a home computer. She was born in 1934 and went all but the last few years of her life without a cell phone. Sometimes, I wished I could just send her a text. But she was the person who kept snail-mail alive for me; I printed 5x7s of the kids to mail to her, I hand wrote her cards, and I called her on her landline.

She didn’t like to chat long. She would ask how everyone was doing and we’d talk about the weather, and then she’d say she’d better let me go. Our conversations were hardly ever longer than 10 minutes. But at the end of every phone call, she’d say, “It was good to hear your voice.”

I’ve been missing that a lot lately. Working remotely, I interact with people almost exclusively on digital platforms. I write emails, I chat on social media, and I text my friends. A few mornings a week, I go to a coffee shop to work. Everyone my age is plugged in and everyone over 60 is doing something richer: They’re catching up. They’re looking one another in the eyes. They’re talking about world events. They’re also retired, and most people my age are trying to make a bit of money, so it’s not a totally fair comparison. But I wonder if us young people took off our headphones if we could still converse in the same way. Based on the way most parents pull out their phones during the five-minute wait at school pickup, I don’t think it would come as naturally.

As recently as 2010, our primary phones were still anchored to one place. At my parent’s house, it was the farmhouse kitchen and shop. Getting a call was a communal thing. We lived out of range of cell towers and had dial-up internet into the time I was a middle schooler. The disconnect made each phone call a little sweeter. The irony is that now, in a time when we can take our phones everywhere, we’re more disconnected than ever. I know that before I had a supercomputer in my hand, I spent more summer dusks barefoot watching the nighthawks fly.

Now, if I get a phone call I don’t expect, I’m primed to think it will be an emergency. Outside of a few people, we seem to collectively believe it will be an inconvenience if we call someone on the phone. We send our message with less urgency, in an email or text. But we’re missing each other’s voices. In a time when many of us have never felt lonelier, in a time when our country is so fiercely divided—when we are at war—it seems to me a big thing we’re missing out on. Voices remind us that there’s a real true human on the other end of the line.

My grandmother died a few months ago, on the morning of a Friday when I’d planned to visit. She was in a nursing home by then, oxygen cords snaking into her nostrils, and most days she kept the blinds shut. It had been all summer since I’d gotten a visit in with her; she lived a few hours away, and an injury in my family had kept me pinned to the city. She’d gotten a cell phone by then, so I sent her a photo of my son’s first day of kindergarten on what would be the eve of her death. She wasn’t feeling well enough to respond. When she died, I realized I hadn’t called in a while. It hit pretty hard that I’d opted for a text in the end. I thought back to all the times she’d called me, or I’d called her. Not once did it feel like a waste of time.

I can’t remember if I always told her back, but I’d be sure to say it now: it was good to hear her voice, too. Really good.

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Writing projects and updates

I’ve committed to writing a draft of a memoir, and I’ve been working on it nearly every day. I promise I won’t make this like that old joke about running: “How can you tell if someone is training for a marathon? They’ll tell you.” But it feels really powerful to finally say “I am writing a book” and own up to that. I know I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, but it feels great to start getting the words down on the page.

Speaking of connecting in person, you can find me at next month’s GetLit! Festival in Spokane. I’ll be on a panel with Joe Wilkins, Beth Alvarado, Ren Cedar Fuller and Uma Kukathas discussing writing and parenting — not under any pretense that we have the answers, but to talk about how the two pursuits are uniquely informative, rather than opposed. April 18. Be there or be square.

I hope this writing finds each of you well. Take care of each other and your communities. And remember that it’s good to hear your voice.