Have you tried to buy a phone lately? I'm talking landline phone. In your house. The kind of phone you can put on your shoulder and talk to your mother while you stir the spaghetti sauce so it doesn't burn. You CAN'T find them. The only things available these days are all cell phone wannabes.
I want a REAL telephone. And OLD telephone. As it happens, when we were growing up (way back through the mists of time). The phone company owned the phone. We were one of the first families on the block to actually BUY our own telephone, and it was pink (the same color as our house). I loved it.
The phone company was made up of grumpy old men and they didn't want people to have extension phones. It was a BIG no-no, but somehow my Dad got hold of an old Art Deco telephone, and he ran the wires and we had TWO--count 'em--TWO phones in our house.
As a kid, I found it hard to lift the receiver of that old phone--it was HEAVY, and I didn't like the phone. Where had it come from? Did it have cooties? When the phone rang, I'd run to the front of the house to use the pink phone just so I wouldn't have to use that terrible old phone.
Of course, now I would KILL to have that phone. I've seen similar phones in antique shops, not in as good shape, and they want between $60 and $100. (The graphic on the left doesn't do that phone justice.)
Since I can't have the phone of my dreams (or at least I'm too cheap to get it--and where would I put it?), I've given it to my character, Tricia Miles. She keeps it in her Haven't Got a Clue bookstore where she sells vintage mysteries. When she uses it, it takes her back to the days of Agatha Cristie and Harriet Vane and getting lost in their adventures.
Maybe what I really need isn't an old phone, but more time to read mysteries.
That sounds good to me.
