I last saw Beatrice at the county fair. It was five years after high school graduation, and she was one of the few Mexicans who finished high school. She was pushing a stroller, and between that and the rugrats gathered around her, I counted five noses announted with cotton candy, candied apples, salt water taffy and other fair fare. They were having the time of their lives, and Beatrice, if you gave her even half a glance, was joyful as well.

Most new college graduates have never - NEVER - dialed a telephone. They've only ever used touch-tone pads.

She wasn't very friendly to me in high school. She wasn't un-friendly, perzackly, but she didn't want anyone to get the wrong idea. She had her sights set on a Mexican boy, and any undue familiarity with a gringo threatened that relationship.

I Don't Know How

If I wanted to contact her, I don't know how I'd do it. She was, last time I knew, a professional Mom. I suppose I could call any of about 20 people in the class who started their own business or took over their parents' business, and ask if they knew how to get a phone number.

But I couldn't call Floyd Yentzer. I know, because I tried to call him. He's a farmer, and he doesn't have a land line any more. He's not close enough to town to get cable television, so he doesn't have a phone through them, either. Vonage and Magic Jack work terrible with satellite internet, so I suppose he is strictly using cellular. And it makes sense for a farmer. If he needs to call a seed dealer and tell him that he's going to need an extra bag of Dekalb XL-347 seed or he wants to call the tractor store and see if they've got in the rebuild kit for the hydraulic cylinder on the combine, he doesn't want to stop work, drive to the house, and hope he doesn't get stuck in telephone tag hell. Nope, he wants to call from his "office" on the John Deere, and get the answer without stopping his disking.

But it makes it hard to keep up with friends and family.

Some DSL is Naked

About five years ago, I switched from a land line to "naked" DSL, using Vonage for my telephony. At the time, Vonage was $15 for 500 minutes, and we used about 40 minutes a month. They're running the ads pointing out that they haven't raised rates, but they've sure nickel-and-dimed me. They added this charge and that charge and the other charge, and when it hit $28, I bought a Magic Jack. Which meant my number changed. Yes, there's a "number portability provision" you can go through to keep your old number, but they make it deliberately difficult to use, all the companies, so I'm among the many who who've said, "What the fuck, the new number is as good as the old number."

Originally, we had cell phones from D&E, and we had internet from them, too, but they developed this nasty little habit of building up wonderful little companies offering great service, and then selling these companies to someone else who let service go all to hell. Their internet went to Earthlink, and I still have a month of dialup service I can go back and claim any time I want it, which will be never. Their cellular went to Mobile-T, and we went to Verizon because Mobile-T was so bad, and then to Cingular because Verizon was so bad, and then Bell South bought AT&T and took that name, and then bought Verizon, and their cell phone service was as bad as the Bell South landline phone I once owned. I went to Virgin Mobile, and using it as little as I do, it's been fine, but Blondie has a lot of clients in the southern part of the county, where nobody has good cellular. For a long time, we'd buy s $20 throwaway complete with 300 minutes everytime we ran out of time, and then we discovered TracFone has dual-network, which means Blondie can get bars most places.

I don't even notice the bars. I just dial, and see if it goes through, and it almost always does, even if there aren't any bars showing. Blondie looks at the bars and won't even try unless there are three bars showing.

Numbers Contantly Change

But all this means that our numbers have been constantly changing. Finally, I fired up Open Office, and printed up a couple of pages of business cards showing our MagicJack house number, and our current cell phone numbers, both of them, and when whenever I go to a doctor's office, I just hand them a new business card, saying, "Here are our current phone numbers."

Switching cell phones so frequently does mean we get a lot of bad phone numbers. If they call and ask for a guy's name, I tell 'em that he's out front with a couple of police officers, talking to then, no wait, it looks like they're putting him in the back of the cruiser. If they ask for a woman's name, I ask if her hair color and whether she has any tattoos. If she has a tattoo, I tell them she's taking a shower before going home to her boyfriend. If she doesn't, I tell them that she's in bed with Jim and Donna, and they don't like to be interrupted. Hey, if I gotta pay for the phone call, I'm gonna get a little entertainment out of it.

But my point - and I do have one - was that a century ago, it really didn't matter that women changed their name when they married, because they didn't move more than five miles when they married, and everybody knew everybody, and there was a book that listed everyone's name in it. These days, people move hundreds of miles at the drop of a hat, switch employers, divorce and marry several times, and may change their phone numbers six times a year.

There's Always Viola, I Suppose

I suppose, if I wanted to call Beatrice, I could call Viola. I'm pretty sure I could find a phone number for Viola, because she set up some kind of a social service agency, and if you're asking for money, you need a website with your real name on it. And being a professional woman, she's likely to keep her maiden name. Viola and Beatrice as worlds apart - Viola is skinny and spiffy, incredibly intelligent and smartly-dressed and probably would make a great secretary, or secretary-general of the United Nations, for that matter, but I'm not sure she'd be a great wife and lover, at least for me. Viola and Beatrice go to the same church, so it's likely that Viola has Beatrice's phone number, even if Beatrice has a new husband by now.

And I think that's pretty likely. Beatrice had an extraordinarily pretty face, nice long curly hair, and the kind of plumby body that gives good hugs. In fact, she gave me a full-body hug, the kind that takes your breath away, right then and there, in front of the sheep barn and the cotton cotton stand and God and everybody. When I was growing up, I was kinda scared of Mexican guys, because Little Mexico had a reputation. Some minority neighborhoods, you want to stay our of at night, but if you wanted to avoid a knife fight in the middle of the day, you didn't go anywhere Little Mexico at high noon. On the other hand, Beatrice said she always noticed me looking at her, as if I'd like to make love to her. Did I ever mention that I'm lousy at Poker?

At the time, Beatrice was a new widow. Her husband had been killed in a head-on collision, and if I'd had any sense, I'd have taken the opportunity to comfort the widow. Skinny women are like a 10-speed bicycle in bed, with too many corners and sharp points, but enthusiastic lovers like Beatrice, built for comfort, are great at sex. Sex is the least part of a great marriage, but Beatrice seemed to have good character, loyalty, intelligence, and common sense, and that goes a long way towards making wonderful wife as well. This predates Em, my late first wife, and at the time, I didn't have the first clue about relationships with women.

Am I In My Family's Lost And Found

But now this has me to thinking. Does anyone in my family know a phone number for me? They're luddites, and they'd be able to figure out that Canthook was my website. They have a street address for me and an email address for me, but if they needed to call me in a hurry, I don't think they could. I suppose I should drop a business card in the mail.

On the other hand, it's been fairly peaceful around here. Maybe, it can wait.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
beautiful women - Bell South - cellular - Cingular - Denver & Ephrata Telephone & Telegraph\ - Earthlink - gringo - John Deere - MagicJack - Mexican - Mobile-T - number portability - touch-tone - TracFone - Verizon - Virgin - Vonage