THE ANCIENT ART OF PHONE CALLING part 1

  

     Most stutterers wish Alexander Graham Bell was never born. What a sadistic man he must have been to invent such a  torturous contraption that demands you talk into it. No crueler punishment has ever befallen the stuttering community. And if the trauma of the phone wasn't bad enough, some fiendish person came along and invented the answering machine too. It meant that from now on a stutter could be captured on tape and replayed over and over.Your stuttered words become someone else's property and they can do whatever they want with it. They could even play it out loud on speaker phone at a party for entertainment. Imagine, the horror!
   The fear of the phone experienced by most stutterers goes beyond any phobia. It is not a fear born in the mind, and it does not go away if you stop thinking about it. It is real, it is ringing, and it is waiting for you to stutter when you answer it. If you ask a stutterer which of three rooms is the scariest to enter -- the one with the tiger, the one with the dangling live electric wires, or the one with the phone that has to be answered, he probably wouldn't be able to tell you because he's already been mauled to death or electrocuted.
    Considering all the humiliation and anxiety the telephone has caused generations of stutterers, it makes perfect sense that people who stutter have a profound dislike and distrust of the phone. What doesn't make sense is my relationship with the phone. I am a stutterer who is addicted to talking on the phone. I can't say for sure I'm the only stutterer like this but I personally have never met another stutterer who had as big a mouth as me and is on the phone as much. What's especially odd is how I'm drawn to the very thing that should be specifically difficult enjoying for a person with a speech problem. A stutterer who is constantly on the phone is equivalent to a paraplegic rock climber or a legally blind archer.
     I have what is almost a romantic relationship with my cellphone. It is what I keep closest to my heart, literally, in the breast pocket of my scrubs. Sometimes I hear people say they left their phone home on the kitchen table or at the office or just decided not to carry it.  To me, it's like deciding not to carry one of my bodily organs.  "I think I'll leave my liver home today."
   My phone, like a pacemaker,  is never turned off.  When I'm at work at the hospital though, I do make the concessions of switching  it to vibrate and never answering it when I'm with a patient. Answering it while I'm helping someone who had a stroke walk for the first time or climb stairs would be detrimental to the patient and even more detrimental to my employment. I only check my voicemail in the hallways away from patients, and make quick calls in the bathroom.  ( I am confessing this  because these quick calls happen only  when I am sitting on the toilet anyway.  I take care of two things at once that  end at the same time causing the hospital no loss of productivity. This is actually an excellent example of an employee multi-tasking, and should be used as a teaching tool throughout my hospital )  I save my longer calls for lunchtime. I have to start my phone calling while I'm still at work  because if I waited until I got home, there would never be enough time to make all the calls I want to make.
   Why I'm like this I can't exactly figure out, but it does give me another perfect opportunity to blame my mother Priscilla for something. The telephone was her tool of choice to use to either show her love or unleash her rage. On a typical weekday she would call up my father at his store 20 times day, 40 when she was mad at him. Scream, hang-up, call back, scream, hang-up, call back. In her mind, calling even if she was planning on  screaming still showed she cared. She was on the phone early morning to late at night, and the receiver usually smelled either like coffee, Norell#10 perfume, cinnamon gum, alcohol, or the unique salty smell of her tears. How she sounded when she was speaking to someone was a preview of how she was going to act when she hung up. I was so accustomed to hearing her on one of  the five telephones in our house that when there was silence, my first thought was always that she had a heart attack or strangled herself by accident with the extra-long coiled phone cords she always ordered. The telephone was such an intricate and important part of her life and her relationships that I grew up thinking that being phoned meant being loved. She would hand me the receiver and make me talk to her friends and our relatives so often that it became a natural thing for me to do even with my stutter. When I started making friends and getting calls myself, I was never more proud, especially in front of her. Thirty-five years later the ring of my phone still excites me.( Well, except if I see on caller I.D. that it's my mother. Ironically, she's the only person who I don't want a call from.)
  My dedication to the art of phone calling has turned into a battle I seem to be having with everyone. The enemy is text messaging, and it is overtaking the world.  I realize I am in this battle alone. No other stutterer feels this way.  Teenage girls are the only other demographic group who embraced textingTexting is what stutterers have been waiting for their whole lives. Finally a way to call someone without having to talk. What could be better?
   In all honesty I completely understand their excitement and relief, and don't blame anyone for texting who has suffered over the telephone like my fellow stutterers have. As a matter of fact, right here and now I give every stutterer out there a free pass to text whenever they want. If anyone deserves it, they do.
   As for the rest of you out there texting instead of calling, don't think you'll keep on getting away with it. You are not escaping talking to me over phone.You are going to have to suffer through my stutter every time I call, like you did before anyone even knew what texting was.

                                       END OF PART 1