The Telephone Book

Our new phone book arrived last week.  The Trucker retrieved it from the front lawn, where it had been delivered in a white plastic bag.  An annual publication from the (not so) local (anymore) phone company.  

We remembered these books from our childhood, and how they were delivered house to house by temporary workers hired by the phone company.  In bags hung on mailboxes, or tossed onto front lawns.

Thick tomes, hundreds of pages, with names, addresses and phone numbers in rows of fine print.  An entertaining diversion on a quiet Sunday afternoon, finding your family's number, or that of friends and relations.  An equal number of advertisements, and fun pages of health and safety warnings, and that list of all the area's zip codes, for when you are addressing Christmas cards.

The Trucker remembers a delivery lady having car trouble when passing by his home when he was in his early teens.  An attempt to assist her landed him in the hospital for a few days with severe burns.  Not a pleasant experience.

His Passenger remembers sitting on several at mealtime as  child, booster seats either not yet having been invented, or at least not having arrived in her home.  Why bother, when the phone book works just as well?  A phone book booster seat also promotes good posture; leaning too far in any direction would cause the whole thing to shift, possibly directing the person parked on the stack floorward.

That same small girl stood on a combination of phone books, a dictionary and her father's Bible concordance as a small child, in order to reach the sink to wash dishes before school.  Again an exercise in agility.  While the dictionary and concordance were reliable supports, the phone book was unpredictable.  A shift to the east would send the book scooting west, and vice versa.

Times have changed.  Those fun memories are just that.  Memories.  Last week's delivery measures 5 x 7 inches, as opposed to the 8 x 10 inches of yesteryear.  Not to mention being a quarter inch thick instead of two inches thick or more.  The hundreds of pages of fine print?  Have become twenty-seven pages of medium print, with a corresponding number of advertising pages.  The zip code page is still present, however.

The dictionary and concordance remain approximately the same size.  The concordance, at least, is still full of truth; the dictionary - well that may be debatable.

But it is doubtful today's phone book would help a small person reach the sink to wash dishes.