Cell phones!
Jake called me last night. Despite my best intentions to never be far from my cell phone while he's away, I missed his call. I went upstairs for bed at 9:00, and he called at 9:08. In my effort to keep the phone near me, I had had it on the couch. It got shifted under the blanket and when I got up I never noticed it and forgot it. We always curl up under blankets on the couch in the winter time. Sometimes in summer, too!
So, this morning I got the message Jake left last night. He got out "Hi, Mom, this is Jake, and I had a few extra minutes and thought I'd call..." and then he turned his head or something. The rest of the message was garbled, that kind of digital warp speed garble where you can hear all the voice, but it's unintelligible. Not the kind where every other syllable is clipped off.
I saved the message. Thinking I might want to hear his voice again. I have a few messages saved on my digital answering machine like that. Little archives of the voices of the people I love. There's the one about Will calling me to ask if he could keep the cat he found at Gram's. There's one of Jake, telling me 'just so someone will know", that he and Mandy are climbing in the car for a last-minute weekend road trip and they picked Ft. Leavenworth, KS as their destination. They swung back by my house on the way home, and that was nice. There's a message from Jon being his silly self. One from my dad, saying something mundane and ordinary, like, "call me back".
The message from Jake on my cell phone voicemail will drop off eventually. Too many system resources will be used up if we all saved every message on the voicemail system. I suppose I could keep it indefinitely if I listened to the time stamp and heard the garbled message every time I checked voicemail, and then pressed 1 to "keep as new". I have to admit that it crosses my mind that it might be the last record of his voice I ever have. Even though he's not there, yet, and I'm going to see him in 2 weeks. Anything can happen.
Anything can happen. It's crazy to think that I waste so much time trying to get to a place in my head where I can hear no one else's voice. Anything can happen to anyone, anywhere. A tree narrowly missed our house in July. We would have been goners if not for the mulberry tree that caught the falling ash and pushed it towards the only place in the yard it could have fallen and not damaged anything at all. What are the odds? What are the odds that Jake will be killed in Iraq? They're slim. I think he's in more danger just driving his car down the street. That would be little comfort to Patrick Kordsmeier's wife, I'm sure. It's not much help to me, either.
I try not to worry, to get perspective. And then that perspective takes me places I don't want to go, with living now and being authentic. So, I save voicemail messages and feel comfortable about that. I feel safe that I'll have that little bit of remembrance. Just in case. And in the meantime Will's talking in my ear about fighter jets and I wish he'd find something else to do. His voice is not that of last spring's dirty-footed 9 year-old boy on the answering machine. It's deeper and better developed and more confident and knowledgeable. It's sweet to hear the voice on the machine. But he's right here, talking to me now. Flying jets around the living room, using the ottoman for an aircraft carrier.
I've decided to delete the garbled message, and I'll get a beltclip for the cell phone. And get up from the computer and sit on the couch and listen to Will fly airplanes around the living room.
posted by Karen Ann @ 8:31 AM
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