Words in the Wires and on the Waves

It was a marvelous, once-in-a-childhood day. Because of a telephone. Actually, because of two telephones, both in our house for that one day. And one was mine.

It hung on the wall—a mahogany box, with a crank on one side and a receiver on the other. One more day, and the telephone company would take this phone away, leaving us with only the strange new rotary phone they had just installed.

But for one day, because my parents had use of the new phone, the old one was mine. And I could crank it to call my friends on our party line as much as I wanted.

All day we talked, Gertrude and Alice and I—about little-kid things, like how they cut a new paper family from the Sears catalog. And how I shook red paint in an empty catsup bottle for a make-believe grocery. And how the telephone company was coming to school to show us how to use a rotary phone so we could teach our parents. We talked and did our chores, talked and ate lunch, talked and set the table for supper.

After that delightful day of unrestrained jabber, I never saw telephone wires the same way again. Those lines strung in the sky—how could they carry so many words from so many people so fast?

Years later, I found someone else who marveled at this, the poet Carl Sandburg:

I am a copper wire slung in the air.
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing—humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying.
     A copper wire.

But the magic didn’t stop with a copper wire.

More than half a century later, words no longer need wires. Now, words from my cell phone ride invisible radio waves that somehow land in a grandkid’s phone in Kentucky or Illinois.

And not just words. Images. And not just images. Moving images. And what next?

That marvel I felt as a kid—it keeps coming back.