No Home Phone

Starting this week, for the first time in my life, I will be without something that I never thought I could live without. My wife and I will be cutting the cord and getting rid of our home phone. Maybe at some point when I was very young, we didn’t have a phone, but as far back as I can remember it’s always been there. I can still remember the phone number I had growing up, even though no one in my family has used it in over twenty five years!

Thinking back, it’s like a trip down memory lane, a trip back to a much simpler time. In the old days, there were no cell phones, so you had to have a home phone. Oh, by the way, there was only one Phone Company back then, so you got what they offered and you paid what they told you. There weren’t any cool, sleek phones, just a few different colors. It hung on the wall and you had to dial the numbers on a rotary dial. Remember how long it took to do a 9 or a 0?

There was also no call waiting, so if you called someone and they were on the phone, you got a busy signal. I can tell you it was totally annoying when my friend, Bruce, would ask me to eat dinner at his house and when I tried to call my Mom, the phone was busy – forever! Okay, in all fairness, it was probably only 10 – 15 minutes, but it felt like forever when the food was almost ready and his Mom had already set a place for me at the table.

Which reminds me; we had a 15-minute limit on phone calls. With six of us living at home and everybody wanting to use the phone (except Dad, he really wasn’t much of a phone talker), there had to be some kind of rules. So my parents instituted an unofficial 15-minute time limit. I say unofficial because if no one else wanted to use the phone or no one was expecting a call, you could stay on longer. However, most nights the phone was in use from 7:00 to 10:00. I think we even had another rule that there were no phone calls after 10:00.

The cool thing about our old, on-the-wall phone was that the cord was extra long, so we could go out into the garage and talk in privacy. It really was not fun to be talking to a girl and have my older brothers making kissing noises or repeating what I said in a mocking tone. When my time was up, I’d get the “Say goodnight to Snooky Wookums” thing, or something similarly embarrassing, and they’d wait right there in front of me until I hung up. It’s probably those times (or because I’m like my Dad in some ways) that I really don’t like to talk on the phone today!

Another great memory I have is Mom sitting there doodling away while she was talking on the phone. She’d get on the phone, take a piece of paper or something from the mail, grab a pen, and start drawing. A little while later, she’d have the whole thing filled with designs and patterns. I thought, and still think, that her doodles were pretty cool. It appears she did get some of her mother’s artistic ability after all.

Saying goodbye is usually not easy, and this does feel kind of strange. However, the only calls we get on the home phone these days are telemarketers. Pretty much everybody else calls our cell phone or texts us. So even though there hasn’t been a cord for many years, we’re cutting the metaphorical cord and doing away with the home phone. Goodbye, and thanks for the memories.

Pranks

The other day at work we were discussing some pranks that have occurred there. In one of them, a stuffed moose from the Holiday Party Yankee Swap was kidnapped and held for ransom. In another, the Manager of Development came in to work to find his office filled with white and pink balloons, wall-to-wall and almost floor-to-ceiling. He could barely even get in the door to his office. In the most recent prank, everything at one guy’s desk was covered with plastic wrap. His chair, his laptop, his monitor, his pens and even his sticky notes were all individually wrapped in plastic cling wrap. Though there were suspects for all these pranks, no one took credit for them.

I’m not against pranks as long as no one gets hurt and nothing is broken. Growing up in a family with nine kids, including seven boys, you either have fun with pranks or you cry and whine all the time. My older brothers played a great prank on my younger brother and I. Three of them would be in their room and they would have us wait in the hall outside of it, then they’d let us back in and one of them would be gone! We’d look under the beds, under the blankets of the top bunk bed, in the closet, and out the windows in case he was hiding outside. He was nowhere to be found. Then they’d have us go back to the hallway for a minute and when we returned to their room, there he was! They did this multiple times and every time one of them was gone. It took us a few years before we realized that there was a trap door to storage space in their closet and that’s where the “missing” brother was going.

Being taught well by my older brothers and being a bit of a wise guy myself, I participated in far too many pranks over the years to detail here, but here are a couple that I remember like they happened last week. 

I used to have an obsession with throwing things up on the ceiling that I think came from The Three Stooges episode where Moe throws a pie up on the ceiling, which then falls onto the face of a rich woman when she looks up. In the fourth grade, Ms. Silverstein, my teacher, stepped out of the room for a moment and I promptly took a Fudgie (a piece of chocolate candy for those who don’t know what I’m talking about), rolled it in a ball and threw it up at the ceiling, where it stuck – just above the door. Most of the kids thought it was funny, so I did the same thing with another, which was followed by more laughter. Ms. Silverstein, sensing something was wrong, came back in and looked around the room trying to figure out what was going on. Meanwhile, the first piece of chocolate was loosening up and barely hanging on to the ceiling right above her head. Just after she turned to go back to her desk, it fell to the ground, missing her by about an inch and landing on the floor. Luckily for me she never did figure out what happened.

You think I would have learned from that near miss, but no, I did something similar in eighth grade. We were doing an “International Week” in Social Studies where each student gave a report on a different country. Someone’s choice was Italy and the person brought in some cheese to share with everybody. While most of my classmates tasted their cheese, I rolled mine into a ball and threw it at the ceiling where it stuck just above my desk. Too many of my classmates were looking up at it so I thought I better get it down before the teacher, Mr. Lown, saw it and gave me detention. I hit it with my pen, but it didn’t move. I waited a minute, so as to not draw attention to myself, and threw my notebook at it, but it held on tight. I figured I needed something bigger, so after another minute I threw my text book up at it and knocked it down – along with the whole ceiling panel that was then all over me, my desk and the floor around me in about a hundred pieces! Needless to say, I got caught.

Looking back all these years later, the pranks I did in school were stupid, as was shutting the classroom closet door on my friend Smitty. Many pranks are kind of stupid. They’re fun at the time, but not so much later. Thankfully no one got hurt in any of the pranks I was involved in, although I did have to sit below a gaping hole in the ceiling of my Social Studies class for about a month. That was painful.

Nicknames

I’ve always wanted to have a cool nickname, one that everybody would know, so that when the name was said everybody would know exactly who they were talking about. I know, it sounds extremely self-centered and selfish. However, when your name is Joe and the best anyone can come up with is Joey, you feel a little underwhelmed. Also, I don’t count knucklehead, nitwit and moron as nicknames, even if my older brothers called me those a lot.

When we used to watch Happy Days, Fonzie had a nephew named Spike. I thought Spike was a cool name, but it just didn’t fit me. I wasn’t a tough guy going around in a leather jacket. I was more of an easy going guy with a fake leather jacket…that cracked and split in the cold weather. Then there was Butch, which may have come from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. However, again the name just didn’t fit me. It was just too tough for a small, scrawny guy like me. For a long time I just went by the pathetic Joey.

Then around sixth grade, I came up with a decent nickname: Fry. That was a name that fit me, because I was small and I was French. My closest neighborhood friends started calling me that, but that was about it. It never caught fire. Even though I even painted a white navy hat with bright, neon colors with the name Fry on the front, and wore it just about everywhere for close to a year, only those few friends called me Fry. I did have one or two friends who called me Jose, what they thought was an ironic twist on my name since my ancestry is French. For both years of junior high, I was simply known as Joe, or Joey by those who’d known me since early-elementary school.

When I got to high school, I ended up with a bunch of different names. A group of guys that were a year older than me and knew my sister started calling me Slits, which was short for Slits for Eyes, because they thought I had small eyes. Then a couple of the guys on the baseball team started calling me Rooster because the nickname of the Red Sox shortstop at the time was Rooster, and I played shortstop. One time I had a good enough game in baseball that my name was in the local paper – as Chuck instead of Joe – so a few people started calling me that. A few guys on the baseball team called me Fifi (pronounced fee fee) because I had a hat that had the letters FE on it, and again because my ancestry was French. I have to tell you, when you get up to bat with the bases loaded and a couple of guys are yelling for Fifi to get a hit, the guys on the other team are not too intimidated.

So here I am fifty something years in to my life and I still don’t have a cool nickname. Now I’m not sure if I even want one. I’ve kind of gotten used to just plain old Joe. No hidden meaning, no people asking me all the time why I’m called Pee Wee or Dimples or Zou Zou. No embarrassing stories going back thirty or forty years that even my kids would get tired of hearing. Nope, you can just call me Joe. Or, as my Dad used to say, “Call me what you want, just don’t call me late for supper!”

It Says So in the Childcraft!

Another post in a series on Famous Family Sayings

In my family, when you made a definitive statement about something you had to be able to prove it. Mom and Dad taught us to question things, so if I said something like “The moon is made out of cheese” someone would ask where I had heard that and then tell me to prove it. Most families had some version of encyclopedias back then, including mine, even if they were a little out of date by the time I started using them. So I’d break out the encyclopedia that included an entry about the moon and then… realize my older brothers had just made a fool of me.

We also had another option that had entries on a whole bunch of topics, a book called Childcraft. It was basically an encyclopedia for kids, with simple language, pictures and illustrations. There were multiple books, but I think we only had one – How Things Work. I used to look up things in there all the time (OK, so I was a little nerdy as a kid), as did other members of my family. That book contained a lot of good information and I found it quite interesting.

One time, my sister had one of those definitive statement moments and when asked how she knew, her simple response was, “It says so in the Childcraft!” While what she said may have been true, my older brothers pounced all over that statement and made a joke out of it. In fact, they thought it was so funny, they started using that line all the time (which us younger ones picked up on and copied so we could be cool like them). That line got used so much it became a Famous Family Saying.

Here are some fictional examples of how this line may have been used:

One of us younger ones: “It’s getting cloudy outside, I think it’s going to rain.”

One of the older ones: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

Me: “Anyone know what’s for dinner?”

Older brother: “Roast beef.”

Me: “Again? Are you sure?”

Older brother: “Yup. It says so in the Childcraft!”

Older brother: “Joey has a new girlfriend.”

Me: “I DO NOT! Who told you that?”

Older brother: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

Older brothers: “Don’t tell Mom what we’re doing. You wanna know why?”

One of us younger ones: “Why?”

Older brothers: “Because if you do…” (fist punching other hand) “You wanna know why?”

One of us younger ones: “Why?”

Older brothers: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

One of us younger ones: “You’re in TROUBLE!”

One of the older ones: “What?!?! I didn’t do anything. How do you know?”

One of us younger ones: “It says so in the Childcraft!”

This last example would have been followed by a mad dash to get away before we got a noogie…or worse.

If you made any kind of statement that sounded smart, there was a good chance it would be followed by “It says so in the Childcraft!” It was funny at times, not so funny at other times. When you were just being a know-it-all, it was funny for everyone. When you were trying to be serious about something and got mocked with that line, it could be very frustrating. Now that I think about it, it was always funny for everyone except the person at whom “It says so in the Childcraft!” was aimed.

We used that phrase so often that the publishers should have been paying us royalties. For years, there wasn’t a week that went by that “It says so in the Childcraft!” didn’t get uttered by at least one of us. The strange thing is, I don’t remember Mom or Dad ever getting involved with this and having to stop it like they did with so many other things. I can’t say no one ever got hurt (at least emotionally), but I guess it never got out of hand. Eventually, as we got older, it died out.

Kids today wouldn’t know an encyclopedia from a cyclorama. Instead of researching something using an encyclopedia, they do their research using the internet. You could make a strong case that their “It says so on the internet” is our “It says so in the Childcraft!” With one exception that is; everything in Childcraft was true. I don’t know if the Childcraft books are still published, but if they were, you could probably look up “internet” and it would say that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. That would be awesome, because when someone asked me how I knew, I could say “It says so in the Childcraft!”

Pains

I work for a software company and work in an office so I don’t do any physical work, unless you call carrying my laptop to a meeting physical work. I can also work from home and connect to the office, so if I’m not feeling so great, I can still work. I don’t get sick too often anyway, so I don’t miss many days from work. Add to all that the fact that no one in the media is following me around or analyzing every move I make and I’d say I have a pretty cushy work life. 

Sometimes I feel bad for professional athletes, especially in sports-obsessed cities like Boston. As a former wannabe athlete, I can tell you that no one wants to get hurt and they don’t want anyone to know they got hurt. So these guys play when they’re hurt (hello Patrice Bergeron of the Boston Bruins) and don’t let on as to how bad they really are. At times, they’re not playing well and we find out later that they’ve been battling a serious injury for days or weeks. Then in cases where someone is hurt and they’re perceived as not toughing it out and still playing, they’re ripped in the media and on every sports talk show by every know-it-all “expert” alive (hello pretty much all the major league baseball players).

When I was in high school I hurt my throwing arm at the beginning of the baseball season but I didn’t tell the coach because I wanted to play. When I couldn’t throw the ball from shortstop to first base anymore the coach finally asked me what the heck was wrong with me. When I told him my arm was killing me he wanted to know why I hadn’t told him earlier. I told him that it hadn’t been that bad until the last couple of days and that I wanted to play. What I didn’t tell him was that I had a childhood incident that haunted me and wouldn’t let me say I was hurt.

We were having one of our neighborhood softball games in our backyard on a nice sunny day. We had about five guys on each team, including three of my older brothers. We had been playing for a while and we took a break to get some water. In those days we didn’t go in the house to get a drink of water, we drank the water right out of the hose. There was nothing like a cold drink out of the hose on a hot summer day. Plus, you could soak your hat or your shirt and stay cooler longer. Mom wouldn’t have let us do that at the kitchen sink.

We all got our drinks and went back to the game. However, I think that I drank too much water because when I started running around again I got a really bad stomach ache. When it was my team’s turn in the field, I couldn’t even stand up straight so I lay down on a picnic bench. I guess no one on my team noticed because the inning started and the first batter hit an easy ground ball right to the spot I should have been in. Needless to say, my brother that was pitching was not happy when he saw me laying on the bench.

When he asked me what I was doing over there laying on the bench, I didn’t quite know what to say so I responded in a pitiful voice “I’ve got pains!” When everyone stopped laughing five minutes later, the mocking began. For the next few minutes after that, I was treated to “I’ve got pains” being said in high pitched voices or like a 3-year old. I was just a kid myself, but I was humiliated. I think I heard that wonderful phrase from my brothers for the next five years whenever I felt sick or got hurt doing something.

So when my coach asked me why I hadn’t told him I was hurt it was kind of a matter of pride. I guess in some small way, I didn’t want him to make fun of me for having a sore arm. In retrospect, I probably humiliated myself by not being able to reach first base from shortstop. I don’t know, maybe some professional athletes had similar situations to mine when they were kids and as adults their pride kicks in, too, and they play hurt.

I’m glad that I don’t get sick much and I can take a day off when I need to without being made fun of or mocked. I just hope that as I head into my senior years I don’t have to lie down on a bench somewhere because “I’ve got pains.”