Basic Instincts

This morning I enjoyed reading a newspaper article about Italian immigrant life on the east side of Buffalo during the 1940s. The writer reminisced about a time when people in the neighborhood did not have telephones, but they used other creative means of communication.

Upstairs and downstairs neighbors banged a spoon on the water pipes as a form of code. One bang meant good morning, two bangs conveyed come up (or down) so we can talk, three bangs screamed emergency--come quick! A simple open window allowed neighbors to shout back-and-forth with ease.

During the late 1970s I lived in a vintage apartment in the mission district of SanFrancisco...dark wood, stained glass, history. Toby and Lauren resided two floors above. Up and down the fire escape stairway out back allowed for frequent visits.

During the 1980s I lived on on the lower east side of New York in a turn of the century tenement building, characterized by the bathtub in the kitchen that I painted pink and five flights of steps up to my top floor unit. There was no intercom. Visitors were required to stand out on Sixth Street and shout my name so I could toss them the key placed inside a sock.

During 2002, I possessed two cell phones and two pagers, a set for each of my two crisis counselor jobs. One position involved on-call shifts during the hours when most people sleep. That job is long gone. Yet, an occasional phantom pager vibration or sound wakes me up. As an amputee sometimes feels pain in the missing limb, I too experience a moment of distress when I hear a particular pager tone ringing in somebody else's life.

In an effort to simplify, I gave up my personal cell phone about a year ago. The other day I stopped by my new landlord's place to pick up keys. He had instructed me to find him working on his back porch. When I did not find him there, I felt a momentary wish to be able to call him on a cell. Returning to basic instincts, I shouted out his name and he immediately appeared from the other side of the house. Simple.