no cell phone...

it's been three full days without one and the experience has some things in common with going on retreat.  i'm not talking, texting and checking email through the day, though if you ask my awesome friends, they'd say i never do that, anyway.  i'm scolded, regularly and appropriately, for my response delays.

hermetic by nature, i also have a very high klutz quotient so verbal communication can get stressful.  it takes a lot of mental energy for me to make words come out of my mouth.  that's why i walk dogs.  they don't require a lot of talking.  that's why i write.  i can blurt all over the page and then take it back before anybody knows.

one time i got an owl stuck on my finger.  it's a long story but for my purposes here, i'll just say that first of all, i don't recommend it and secondly, that on the way to the hospital, bird on hand, i called the insurance company for permission to go to the ER.  that was 10 years ago and i could call them today and whoever answered the phone would ask, in a tone of voice i recognize from childhood, what is it this time?  they say to me, remember when you got the owl stuck on your finger?  like i could forget.  like, when are these people going to retire?

see?  right there's a call i sort of wish i'd never made...something i said that i'm wishing i never had...haunting me a decade later.

so it makes sense that i have a love/hate relationship with my cell phone.  the hate part plays out in the variety and frequency with which i regularly lose and destroy them.   i've slammed them in car doors, dropped and run over them and we all know they don't float.  i've found them in the freezer, the chicken shed and next to the melons at the grocery store.  i need a child-proof, inflatable phone on a stretchy cord.

or maybe i need a keeper.  someone to follow me around with my phone and my car keys and my glasses.  and my wallet.  but not my pen.

i never lose my pen.