Once You Walked Out the Door, You Were Gone |
Nobody could reach you at the hardware store, on the highway, or in a boat on the lake. We did not call it freedom. We did not call it anything. |
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News for the America we remember |
The phone was attached to the wall by a cord, and the wall was attached to the house, and the house was in one place. That was the entire arrangement, and everything else followed from it. |
If you left, you were unreachable. Not hard to reach. Unreachable. There was no mechanism. A man could get in his car on a Saturday morning to go look at a used truck two towns over and be, for the next five hours, entirely outside the reach of every person who knew him. Nobody thought this was remarkable. Nobody worried about it, either, except in the ordinary way. |
What that meant, in practice, was that plans had to be made in advance and then honored. You said you would be at the corner of Fifth and Main at two o'clock, and then you were at the corner of Fifth and Main at two o'clock, because there was no way to send word that you were running late. There was no renegotiating from the road. The plan was the plan. I have watched my grandchildren make arrangements that get revised four times while everyone is already in motion, and I understand why they do it, but I do not think it has made anybody more punctual. |
It also meant a certain amount of waiting, and the waiting had a texture to it. You stood outside the movie theater and looked down the street. You went inside and got a coffee and came back out and looked down the street again. The best of it was the driving. A long trip in a car was genuinely time out of the world. Eight hours between here and there, no way to check in, no way for the office to find you, nothing but the radio going in and out of range and whoever was in the passenger seat. My wife and I did the whole trip to see her mother that way for twenty years, and we talked about things on those drives that we did not talk about at home. There was no other option in the car. You could not scroll. You could look out the window or you could talk. And when you got there, you called from her mother's kitchen to tell your own mother you had arrived safe, and that call was a small ceremony. Made it fine. Roads were clear past Harrisburg. Talk to you Sunday. There was a real cost to all of this, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. If something went wrong, you were on your own. A flat tire at night on a two-lane road meant walking to |
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