Phone Calls in the Dark

There was this girl. Her name was Nicole, I think. She was in my 2nd grade class at Thomas Olaeta Elementary School in Atwater, California. We were friends. I don't remember much about our friendship, how it started or what we used to do at school. Her face is still in my memory -- if it has not been aggregated with overlapping memories of all the wonderful people I have known (and I have no confidence in my memories after all these years). A slightly rounded face (we were only eight!) with dark, curly hair on top. A bright smile. A voice like Suzanne Pleshette (for those of you who remember this remarkable actress). No, she didn't smoke, not that I recall (we were only eight!). But I thought her voice was enchanting.

We enjoyed talking. A lot. About stuff, whatever it is that eight year old children talk about. I've always been a bit of a motormouth, and she must've been extremely patient; or maybe she was the only one who could out-talk me. I don't recall.

The one strong memory I have of Nicole is of talking to her on the telephone. It is the first memory I have of talking to anyone on the telephone. I'm sure at one point earlier in my life (I was already eight!) my parents would have given me the phone to talk to a relative or someone, but this is the first memory I have of holding a phone in my hand and talking to someone. Perhaps because I actually dialed the number myself.

I remember coming home from school and running into Mom and Dad's room (because that is where the phone was, at least in my not-very-reliable memory; did they have a second phone in the bedroom? That seems like such an extravagance for a young family, but my mom was a nurse and might've needed one by the bed in case she was called in to work.) I remember sitting down (on the bed? on a chair?) and facing the wall and holding the phone.

And while I distinctly remember holding a piece of paper in my hand with her number on it, yet I don't remember dialing it. I remember her voice on the phone, though. Bright, sunny, laughing. And I remember talking to her as though we were still at school, talking to her for what seemed like hours, but was probably no more than ten minutes or so.

There is no memory of the number of times we talked on the phone, only a singular moment in time that lives in my brain, a short movie of a slice of my life that has endured over all these years. And it always brings with the the joy of friendship, the miraculous wonder of conversing with someone for whom we share affection, and a strange melancholic twinge of loss for the broken link that lies so long ago in the past, wondering what might have been had we not packed up and moved away so soon after.

I hope you have a good life, Nicole, wherever you ended up. And found many wonderful people to talk to along the way.