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| Land lines: headed for the museum? |
As I write from floor 17, we’ve had a cooling break in the weather, and this past weekend the first of the Thunderbird jets shrieked by shortly after a blast on a boat’s horn and the first water skier shooting down the lagoon outside my balcon. Old pros like me have seen many daring devils of the air fly by and at times, though not many times, I find myself shutting the patio doors to keep out the noise. Government “specialists” bustled about shooing problematical fowl away so as not to foul the jet engines. Their “specialty” was igniting small firecrackers. What a laugh. The swallows that usually fly around snatching at gnats were mighty confused.
And per usual, our “guest” parking lot south of the building had its usual share of interlopers stealing parking spaces by parking in clearly posted (by the City of Milwaukee) areas with yellow lines. A fellow emerged from the bushes, drunk and disheveled, and paused to wash his hair in our front fountain. In our lower level car-washing space, someone with Florida plates had the balls to park in front of the no parking sign. For shame. Former Green Bay Packer guy, Willie Davis (he lives in the unit next to mine), hauled in from Canton, Ohio, where he attended the Hall of Fame ceremonies. The woman with him was “afraid” to park their SUV in our underground parking, so I found her a slot in the “guest” lot. Let’s face it, no one follows the lengthy parking rules around here, why bother having them?
This week I visited a small park near where Brady collides with Holton, Water Street and Van Buren. It was a perfect day to sit and write for a scheduled September piece in the Shepherd Express. You’ll have to read it to learn more, but suffice it to say, I’m enjoying using fewer words these days, in effect, finding myself able to express more with less.
My computer is back in place after a horrific crash and burn, and because I still cling to dial-up, it is taking hours to download lost-in-space junk. I will survive, but I’m telling you now that a decade ago while writing for Milwaukee Magazine, I was still handing in my text on a sheet of lined paper. Of course someone on staff then had the odious job of typing it into a computer.
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| “Dial M for Murder” |
Eventually, I had to cease my Neanderthal ways and get with the program, but I despise computers and cell phones. My landline is a 1940s style telephone that reminds me of something Grace Kelly used in Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder.” Today I read a lengthy article in the New Yorker Magazine, detailing the Murdoch debacle in all of its grisly hacking scandal and it reminds me of growing up in Iowa, in a small town, where our one phone hung on the wall in the dining room. Somewhere off the town square, sitting on a swivel chair, was our lone “operator,” a female who knew exactly who she would be talking to when I picked up our phone and said, “Blue 4 please.” “Oh, Judy, hi,” she chirped. Only the most important businesses in the population of 1,000 mostly Republican souls had a private line, the result being that anything said by the rest of the populace was spread like peanut butter on warm toast.
Listening in, a form of hacking, was a sport of sorts. There was comfort in knowing who was on your particular “party line,” though. Our town newspaper is still publishing after 175 years, and (full disclosure), I write a weekly column for them, send it electronically, and voila, there it is the next week. In the ’40s, I recall asking the editor of the paper if he would hire me as a reporter and he told me to come back when I learned to spell “Omaha.” Long story short, it was the beginning of my writing career. At age 16, I got a job in Kansas City, working on a big board strung with snaking plug-ins that lit up when someone wanted to be ah, plugged in. The owner of the luxe ladies’ emporium for upscale dressing ignored my pleas for help. “Oh, you’ll catch on,” he snapped. And I did…after one long sweaty day of plugging him in, in all the wrong holes….
Up here on floor 17, my landline rarely rings. My ears have started to ring, but the doctor says, “Don’t worry about the ringing in your ears. When you are completely deaf, it won’t bother you.”
