Published: December 09, 2007 11:04 am         

Hey! Some turkey on the phone wants you

A friend of mine recently had an experience that left me with mixed feelings, including the suspicion it was a trap that could have caught me or some of my middle-aged contemporaries who also suffer from CRS (Can’t Remember Stuff).

The guy was in a store talking to one of his buddies when a young girl approached them in a condition that verged on weeping. (The modern-speaking sanitizers of our language who talk about “servers,” “providers” and “enablers” might say she was “experiencing a distress event” or “confronting an anxiety situation.”)

“I’m locked out of my car,” she said. “I keep pushing the button on my key to unlock the door, but nothing happens. I think the battery’s dead. I don’t know how I’m going to get home.”

“I’ll take this one,” my friend’s buddy said.

They all went to her car. The guy took the electronic car-locking/unlocking apparatus, pointed it at the door and pushed the button several times. Nothing happened.

Then, like Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain during his shining moment of glory that long-ago Third of July at Little Round Top near the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, he fixed bayonet and charged.

That is to say, he inserted the protuberant metal portion of the electronic car-locking/unlocking apparatus — the long shiny thing with the grooves and what looks like teeth on it — into the little slot in the door lock.

He turned it, the lock clicked, and he opened the door. Then he handed the electronic car-locking/unlocking apparatus to the young lady.

“Here ya go,” he said cheerfully.

It would be tempting to make fun of this girl, but a friend who is my age has tried unsuccessfully to use the electronic car-locking/unlocking apparatus on her the front door of her house more than once. “Honey,” her husband says gently, “that ain’t-a-goin’ to work.”

I myself have tried to use the electronic car-locking/unlocking apparatus on the garage door, and it is probably due only to the fact that I keep my keys, watch and wallet in a bowl out of sitting-there-and-reaching-for-it distance from my easy chair that I have yet to try it on the television.

What my late grandfather might have thought about all of this, I can only wonder. He died in 1959 and was as fascinated by gadgets and modern conveniences as anyone could possibly be, filling his home and barber shop and my grandmother’s kitchen with them. (Although they both had washing machines, Grandmother had a clothes drier long before my mom did.)

Grandfather Goldsworthy had an enormous floor-model radio and one of the first televisions in Keyser. His pride and joy was a Sylvania model TV with a fluorescent light ring around the screen that provided a halo effect which was said to have a relaxing effect on the eyes. It was a famous TV.

When the newspaper bought its first generation of computers that editors use to assemble an entire page on the screen, my cohorts and I took turns sitting at the demo model fiddling with its controls, importing photographs, writing headlines and moving boxes of type around.

For no reason I could explain in a way that an atheist or a self-proclaimed rational thinker would accept, I stopped what I was doing, looked up over my left shoulder and asked, “Whaddya think, Granddad? Isn’t this something?”

I had the feeling he agreed that it was.

——————

I haven’t been tempted to use my cell phone on the TV or any of my doors, but still have fun with it in a way most folks might not think of — although some might.

My cell phone flips open and flips closed, and the only living person who has its number is my girl cousin, Cyndy, who lives near Parkersburg, W.Va.

She and I communicate by cell phone when we are going to be in close proximity and want to arrange a meeting, like when she is passing through here on her way to visit her brother, Craig. She lives 3 1/2 hours from here and calls when she’s 10 or 15 minutes out of town.

We first did this a couple of years ago when we met in Morgantown at the university hospital to attend a memorial service for the deceased who had donated their bodies to medical research, Uncle Abe (Cyndy and Craig’s dad) being one of them.

Cyndy and I agreed to meet at the front entrance, but she never showed up, and eventually my cell phone rang.

I looked at its caller ID, then flipped it open with a toss of my wrist and said in my best command voice, “Kirk here.”

There was a rewardingly long silence on the other end of the line ... well, not the line, but ... whatever ... you know ... call it what you want ... the ether, maybe ... and finally she said, “Jimmy?”

She had been waiting at what she considered the front entrance, while I was waiting at what I considered the front entrance, on opposite sides of the building.

Now, each time Cyndy calls me on the cell phone, I flip it open and say, “Kirk here.”

I eventually had to explain to her that a girl I know threw me out of her apartment because I liked to recite the dialogue from Star Trek episodes I’d seen a dozen times, but she hadn’t seen even once.

Fact is, she threw me out frequently for the same reason, and although we lived together, she was somebody else’s girlfriend. (She rented the upstairs apartment from my parents, you see.)

And when Cyndy answers the phone on Thanksgiving, she doesn’t have to ask who’s gobbling at her.