Abraham and the Phone

I am writing a story in response to Ester Chilton’s prompt on the topic of phones. I was immediately inspired because of my Fathers relationship with the phone, which I think is very special. Thank you for the opportunity to share his interest.

My Father Abraham, who is in his mid-eighties, lives alone and yet always creative, every day he picks a different enterprise to call and chat with customer service.

He’s received overwhelming kindness from the responsive representatives; coupons with deep discounts, useful tools for the garden, a recipe book for Alaskan cod, a turner plate for the microwave he refuses to trade in for a newer one, an ignitor for his gas grill….

Indeed, he fills his day with calls, and also picks up the phone to reach out to the police and fire services to report damaged power lines, graffiti and dangerous hazards he sees along the road. He pays all his bills over the phone as an excuse to chat away.

He even takes pleasure in receiving random solicitation calls from Jamaica, Portugal, Nigeria, and South America. He begins to admonish them for wasting his precious time, and why don’t they find honest work and stop scamming the older citizens. He says sometimes they hang up on him and yet sometimes they stay on and listen.

He has a phone in every room of his house from every decade ranging from 1970’s to current technology. We will wait to count how many clocks he has for a maybe one day clock theme!

Mind you, he doesn’t sit around at home all day. He works in the garden from morning until afternoon, and then takes pleasure in running errands locally around town, stopping and visiting with his favorite people.

Indeed, he has always been a chatty Abraham, but his neighbors all love him because he watches after their homes while they are at work and often when I visit he is busy taking calls from all the generous caring people.

He has made use of the phone, and calls the fiber optics “magic.” “They move across time and space,” he says, “over lines deep within the oceans, across continents and carry messages back and forth.” I love the phone because of this magic, God gave us a tool to reach out across the globe whenever and to whomever we want. “You see, Jordy, we’ve been chatting for over an hour and do each night, while you are 430 miles from me! For a man of 83, I call the phone a gift from God”