It is day eight of Robert’s Covid illness, and he has been in the hospital since the two falls out of bed on December 30th. Was this inevitable, were the two falls preventable? Obviously he contracted Covid in that rehab or else in the ER. It feels like we have been shoved down a strange, dark path, bumping into a forest of eery growth and underbrush that trips us at ever step. The situation is so incomprehensible, so deeply scary and beyond expectancy, it is an endless Halloween trick without a treat in sight. Masks and all.

It is what life has become.

So, let’s rewind the clock to the early years, to my beginning with Robert when it wasn’t even a beginning yet. It was a seed that something put out into the Universe. I have written about it before, likely, somewhere buried in the blog. It is a Robert story. He has always been the kind of person who did as he pleased; was a free spirit, sometimes to my dismay, who saw things differently than most people and who practiced the art of righteous indignation.

Over the years I have viewed him from my very well-tuned establishment eyes: it wasn’t easy. He was a boat rocker and I was oft seasick. Let’s begin here.

Once upon a time, perhaps around 1968 at The City College of New York, there were wooden phone booths in the Finley Student Center that each housed a pay phone. Yes, Virginia, telephones that had coin slots and dials. There was no such thing in the primitive time of my young adulthood as a push-button. The price of a call was a dime. Each slot represented numbers and letters. Each area of the city was rife with neighborhoods. And each neighborhood was represented by a phone “exchange.” Downtown, where I lived there was Spring-7, Oregon-3, Orchard-4, Canal-8...

Remember the movie, Butterfield-8 with Liz Taylor? She lived somewhere in midtown. Further, uptown it might be Lorraine-9. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, at grandma’s, that BU was not Butterfield, it was Buckminster. Whether you lived in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx or Staten Island, your phone exchange was unique, as it was all over the country.

Well, I was already married to husband #1 who, like I, was just a kid with a cockamamie dream to be an adult, to get out of one’s homestead and be on their own. I was a mere sophomore in college, doing all the stuff: Going to school, taking care of a place, schlepping to the laundromat, the supermarket, working part time in the Empire State Building. We were likely about twenty years old at the time; our place was a dump, four steps underground in the basement of a tiny house on Laconia Avenue in The Bronx, filled with strange insect creatures. I commuted to work by walking almost a mile to a bus, taking a bus to a subway, then walking close to another mile up the hills of Harlem where the phone exchange was Adirondack-4. AD-4.

The phone exchanges were one of the last bastions of charm, anywhere in the country. The phone companies wanted to do away with that charm, ditch the letters, make the “exchanges” defunct and go to all-digits. They thought it was easier to remember. But for those of us who prefer English to Math, leave our words alone.

The Oregon-3 of my youth would eventually be taunted with 673. My then-husband’s Washington Heights phone was threatened with 569 from the beautiful Lorraine-9.

Someone at City College, better known as CCNY, was not going to let that happen.

In the center of the phone dials of these coin phones was a disc. The disc was printed with the number for that phone, after all, someone might want to reach you on that phone. Or, maybe, you were expecting a call-back. So, the number, with its exchange, would enhance the discs center… it would begin with ADirondack-4 and continue in numbers.

One day, Ma Bell’s field guy made the rounds and took out the discs and left behind a freshly printed one, displaying the new iteration of the number as 234, followed by four more numbers. Everyone in NYC had a 212 area code at the time and that didn’t have to precede a phone call: There were enough numbers to go around.

I would go into a phone booth at school, to make a call, dime in hand, and one day the center disc said, 234- _____.

The next day, it would go back to the old phone exchange, hand written and embellished with a little flower: A daisy with a trailing stem and a little leaf or two.

This war of phone exchanges went on for days. Possibly months or even years. I don’t recall if anyone of the participants gave up, but it was likely that the handwritten flower and AD-4 remained. Someone had gumption and determination. The zeitgeist of the 60s caused that flower-power to bloom all over the place, while the importance of history, the desire to keep things unique and memorable were on some rebel’s mind.

It was the years of peace. Of love. Of Laugh-In and the newly-found Beatles. Of men on the moon. Of the beginning of independence, which, by the way, was just an illusion. It was the beginning of an end; of a final period of innocence for me as a young adult that ended with the death of my first husband when he was twenty-eight.

But the Adirondack-4 era taught me that some people are fearless in the face of the establishment, they do not rely on boundaries, societal or personal, to define themselves. I was intrigued. I was envious. Alas, at some point, one by one the phone exchanges became all boring digits. There is just so much one person can do.

Years later I learned that the illusive person who replaced the phone discs and saved bits of history with his words and flowers, at least for a while, was none other than

Robert.

More on exchanges here

Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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