Evolutionary Telephonics

The best telephone I ever had was the Snoopy phone my parents gave me for Christmas when I was a kid. I long had a thing for Snoopy, Charlie Brown's imaginative, intelligent pet. I collected Snoopy stuffed animals. I had a Snoopy lunchbox. I owned Snoopy folders and posters and stickers and stationery and the only thing missing until that blissful, perfect Christmas was a Snoopy telephone.

I recently tried to count how many telephones I've had since, but it was impossible. I moved around a lot. I lived in something like 33 different places by the time I turned 33, got married, and moved onto a sailboat. Most of those temporary residences came with Princess phones belonging to roommates who'd arrived before me (and stayed on after I left). A mobile phone didn't enter my atmosphere until 2005. I'd barely switched from a wall phone with a tangled cord to the wireless remote contraption that gave one the surprising freedom of walking around the house - even sometimes as far as the porch! (Those years on the sailboat, during which our only oral communication was through a Ham radio or VHF, delayed my telephonic evolution considerably.)

In fact, I still owned - and more astonishingly, was still using - the Snoopy telephone in 1999. It may be hard to picture a 30-something woman talking on a toy, but there you have it. I only sold it at a garage sale because I was moving onto the marital boat. I almost burst into tears when I took the limp five dollar bill from the early bird shopper who scooped Snoop away from me. I still sometimes wonder why I didn't put that old relic in a box to store in my parents' attic, to cling to that piece of my childhood with the same ardor I now associate only with hoarders. But where would I put it today? And furthermore - where is the telephone jack in my house?

Much like the rest of the world, I now have a cellular phone that slips into a pants pocket or purse or slides carelessly down the crack between the car seat and console. It's my fourth since 2005 and my "everything" phone. It's embarrassing to pull out. It seemed so hip and modern when I got it, but it's already obsolete. It's not Smart. It's not 3G. Its camera is pitiful, there's no swipey feature, you can't talk to it and create a text. I try never to pull it out in the company of iPhone users. I doubt I'd be openly ridiculed, but I fear they'd think less of me.

I wonder what Snoopy would think of all this. His cartoon represented something to me, sitting on top of his little red dog house banging away on a manual typewriter. "It was a dark and stormy night..." He was an author whose walls were lined with rejection letters, like me. Snoopy lived in a dream world of his own invention, the same way I do whenever I can get away with it. He didn't even know he was a dog. He was Joe Cool in sunglasses and the Flying Ace in goggles; he was a shortstop, an attorney, a grocer, an Olympic figure skater... the sky was the limit for that little dog.

Sigh. I miss my Snoopy phone. But I'm becoming someone who only looks forward, not back. Eventually, I'll get a Smartphone. Perhaps, in quiet tribute, I'll find a cover for it that bears Snoopy's image, for old time's sake.