Actually, “lost” is mother-of-a-toddler code for, “I left my cell phone in the pocket of the shorts I wore to the pool with Jake and ran it through the washing machine.” Raz-r phones, I probably don’t have to tell you, do not like being run through the washing machine.
When Mike first announced that he had found my cell phone resting amidst the tangle of damp clothes waiting to be transferred to the dryer, I had a brief, flickering hope that all would be fine. I admit, shamefully, that this was not the first experience one of my cell phones has had with water. My former, L.A. Raz-r phone once slid neatly out of the back pocket where I had tucked it and into the toilet one unfortunate morning last spring. In an amazing stroke of luck that happens only once in a lifetime, when I called the cell phone company to report my “broken” cell phone, the dot under the battery that tells them when someone has dropped her phone in the toilet had not turned a tell-tale red, so I got a brand new replacement phone free of charge. Audrey, our bloodhound mix, chewed it up the next day, but that’s another story.
As I said, such strokes of luck rarely occur twice (even when arguably neutralized by a hound dog with bad chewing habits). This time, the dot was a bright, accusing, you-put-me-through-the-washing-machine red.
You’d think I would have sprung into action replacing my cell phone. But I felt unaccountably relaxed about the whole project. The only person who ever calls me on it is Mike, it seems, and while I do love touching base with him during the day he managed to catch me on the land line frequently enough to allow the week to start dwindling without my really questioning his decision to see if the phone might come back to life after a week, as a friend of his claimed his had.
By the time the weekend arrived with no real action taken, I missed a message from the mother of Jake’s first girlfriend in Long Beach and began to feel a bit remote. And sad that I didn’t have her number written down somewhere so I could call her back the old fashioned way. But, after all, the only time I had for returning calls was when I was walking Jake somewhere in the stroller or driving to Earth Fare for groceries, so, absent my cell phone, I couldn’t very well return it anyhow. Since Mike and I were having our very first non-relatives-over-for-dinner social event Saturday night, I was willing to let the weekend pass without making that crucial contact with someone other than my husband who knows me better than is possible from a few casual conversations on the sidewalk in front of the house.
It wasn’t until Monday, when I was caught between waiting at home for the return business phone calls I was expecting or getting out of the house to run crucial errands, that I began to wobble. How, I fumed, am I supposed to carry on with my life when I’m stuck at home waiting for the phone to ring?
Never mind that we used to do it all the time. The world has changed, and so has my ability to wait a little bit longer for the information I need. Finally, at the end of an otherwise admirable week of almost carefree cell phone-less-ness, the loss of something as un-yoga-like as a cell phone was making me lose my mind.
