I still have a landline, which surprises some people when it comes up, and next to it sits a spiral notebook I use for jotting down numbers and messages the way people did before phones remembered everything for us automatically. It’s not the same notebook I’ve always had. I go through them every few years as the pages fill up. But this current one has been going for a while now, long enough that flipping through it is its own small trip through recent history.
What Fills Most of the Pages
Most of it is unremarkable, exactly what you’d expect. The number for the plumber I call more often than I’d like to admit, given the age of this house. A reminder about a delivery window written down while I was half listening to a recorded message. Wanda’s number, written twice for some reason, once in my regular handwriting and once larger, like I was writing it for someone else, though I can’t remember doing that or why.
There’s a page near the middle where I apparently took a message for myself, from myself, a habit I have where if I think of something while I’m on another call I’ll scribble it down mid conversation without fully registering what I’m doing until later. That page just says ask about the roof, which I did eventually handle, though I couldn’t tell you now what specifically needed asking about.
The Message I Never Crossed Out
There’s one entry, further back in the notebook, that I’ve never crossed off even though the notebook fills up with plenty of entries I do cross out once they’re handled. It’s a phone number and a name, someone my husband used to talk to occasionally, a fishing buddy of his from years back, and the message just says call him back, written in my handwriting from a call I must have taken for him at some point.
I don’t know why that page has stayed uncrossed all this time. It’s not that I think about it often. Most days I flip right past it without a second thought, the way you do with a page you’ve seen so many times it stops registering. But every so often, flipping through looking for something else, I land on it and pause for a second before moving on.
Why I Haven’t Called That Number
I’ve thought about calling, just to see if it’s even still his number after all this time, to tell him, if he doesn’t already know, though I imagine word travels in ways I’m not fully aware of. I haven’t done it. I’m not entirely sure what’s held me back, whether it’s not wanting to intrude on someone I barely know myself, or some reluctance to close out that particular page for good by finally making the call it’s been waiting for.
What Wanda Does With Her Old Numbers
I asked Wanda once if she keeps a similar notebook, and she said she used to, decades of them stacked in a closet somewhere, until one day she decided the stack had gotten too tall and threw the whole lot out at once, numbers and messages and everything, without going through them individually first. I asked if she regretted that and she said not particularly, that a number without the person attached to it anymore isn’t really worth much, which is a more practical view of the whole thing than I’ve managed to arrive at myself.
The Rest of the Notebook
Beyond that one page, the notebook is mostly just useful clutter, the ordinary record of a life that still relies on a landline and a pen for certain kinds of small business. I like having it, honestly, more than I probably need to at this point when most of what’s in it could just as easily live in a phone. There’s something about the physical act of writing a number down that feels more permanent than typing it, even though the notebook itself is exactly the kind of thing that could get lost or thrown out without much ceremony.
What I’ll Probably Do
I imagine I’ll keep not crossing out that page for a while yet, and I imagine I’ll keep not calling the number either. At some point the notebook will fill up entirely and I’ll start a new one, and I don’t know yet whether I’ll copy that particular entry over into the fresh pages or finally let it stay behind in the old one, closed and set aside, the way the earlier notebooks eventually were.
An Unexpected Call the Other Way
A strange thing happened a few months back that I still think about. The phone rang, an unfamiliar number, and it turned out to be that same fishing buddy, calling for reasons that had nothing to do with the old message at all, just an old friend trying to reconnect after years of losing touch with most people from that part of my husband’s life. I told him, gently, what he probably already suspected given how long it had been. He was quiet for a moment and then thanked me for telling him plainly instead of dancing around it.
We talked for a while after that, about fishing trips I only knew secondhand, about a version of my husband I hadn’t heard described in exactly those terms before. I still haven’t crossed the page out. If anything, the call made me want to keep it even longer, not as an unfinished task anymore but as a small marker of the one time it actually led somewhere.