I just realized as I was typing the title for today's epistle that I am truly a fossil.
I'm not sure how many, if any, of the people I've known and or worked with in all the years we've been back in The Land of the Round Doorknobs, have a landline telephone (we do) so my reference to waiting on a dial tone might be as inappropriate as characterizing someone's complaints as 'sounding like a broken record.'
It's okay, I suspect I'd look good in high-button shoes and a waistcoat with a handle-bar mustache (channeling my inner Ben Davidson). Despite having a cellphone for (guessing here) about twenty years, I still have difficulty making or receiving calls, especially the former as I wait for a dial tone that is never coming. Some day in the not-too-distant future, no one on earth will know what a dial tone is.
I made my livelihood with words in one form or another for about fifty years. Spoken or written, I threw them against walls and sometimes they stuck, and sometimes no luck. But the words I seem to return to in search of solace and closure (?) are the words I never shared.
We all get busy or lose sight of someone who once meant the world to us. Sometimes the dynamics change and what was once a friendship devolves into an acquaintanceship or even less. Sometimes there's collateral damage on the human highway and after we've slowed down to look at it, we resume normal speed and never think about it again.
In recent days, mutual friends shared the sad news that someone I'd known and worked with over four decades ago, and who had reintroduced us through a social media platform a few short years ago, had passed away. Our online relationship had been both thoughtful and thought-provoking (all thanks to him as I certainly couldn't contribute a meaningful thought on a bet).
Just the day before receiving the news of his passing, I sat down to drop him a line and what passed for thoughts in my case and got distracted by the hurly-burly of the day and never finished my note and now, of course, I never shall.
And then, perhaps because there is a Master Clockmaker in our universe, I came across an article that reduced me to tears and also offered me a comfort that I hadn't expected or intended. If you've never encountered a Wind Phone, now you can say that you have.
And you needn't journey to Japan to use it. Just a reminder from me to you that 'Hello' is the first step in a journey we start anew every day.
-bill kenny