Guest post by Ellen
Pritsker
Last
week a girlfriend and I took a road trip through southeast Wisconsin, stopping
at a spa resort, great local art museum and then in Door County. Driving back down towards Chicago, we spent a
night at a renovated, turn-of-the century hotel in Algoma—a lightly gentrified
little lakefront town.
The
hotel was pleasant and felt far from the madding crowd. We savored the thick
walls between rooms—a bonus of elder construction. No hearing side conversations, creaking bed
springs or late-night television--impromptu messages from neighboring guests in
most contemporary motor lodges.
The cozy
hotel lobby featured a restored relic of our near-past-- a working phone booth.
Memorialized by Hitchcock in The Birds, they were once as common as fire hydrants. Of course, I pulled out my
‘phone-in-a-handheld-booth’ and captured an image of this iconic and vanishing
cultural artifact.
Days later and back in Chicago, I was sharing
vacation photos off my I-Phone with my very sophisticated 15-year-old
granddaughter.
She
scrolled past the interior art gallery shots and the one of me standing on a
lakefront causeway with a red lighthouse in the background. She came to the photo of the front of the phone
booth: “What is that,” she inquired.
“It’s a phone
booth!”
“You
mean, you sit inside and talk on your cell phone?”
“Not
exactly, you sit down on the little bench inside, close the glass doors and
talk on the pay phone.”
“What is
a pay phone?”
“It is a
phone mounted on the wall and you put coins in it to make your call.”
“You
mean, that’s the thing where they say—please deposit more coins?”
“Exactly.”
“Weird.”
I remain
uncertain what is weird—the phone booth, the notion of actually having coins to
deposit or that fact that her grandmother comes from a world of the past—where
people sat down in a designated sanctuary to concentrate on just a phone call.
© Ellen Pritsker
