Tuesday 18 September 2018

ansible oder zum gedanken an

Moving house and home a few months ago and by sheer dint of having too many things, we had to cull some of our stuff—including a telephone that belonged to H’s grandmother (it’s funny how landlines in general are referred too as granny phones), which I took with the instructions to dispose of it.
Of course, I didn’t do as I was told—mostly because the dial, enigmatically and I still haven’t figured out why, only went up to eight—though there’s slots for the zero and nine. Now that H’s grandmother has recently passed away, I’m glad we held on to her telephone—especially in keeping with this special telephone booth installed in a town ravaged by the tsunami and Fukushima disaster of 2011 to let people commune with those they’ve lost, and perhaps with those that they never got to say goodbye to. I know I’m conflating metaphors and confusing two histories with their own canons but having grown up in the shadow of Colditz castle and having worked there, I associated her story with the series Hogan’s Heroes—which by coincidence premiered in 1965 on the same day as we lost her.