Old Telephone Books

I have a drawer in an old cupboard where I keep phone books. Lots of old phone books. Some people find it funny that I keep them when we now have phones that store people's phone numbers, making them available to us instantly on demand. While on demand saves you time, it also deprives you of a moment of slowing down and searching pages full of names and addresses and those phone numbers. 

I've always considered phone books to be mini history books of a certain place and a certain time. They offer glimpses of names of people who may have moved or passed away or once been your neighbor on a street of long ago. They highlight businesses, everything from corner stores you may have frequented on your way home from school to retail stores that might have since been torn down or closed or moved away. They list the banks. The schools. The funeral homes. The industries and lawyers and hospitals and everything else that makes up a community. And we can't forget those Yellow Pages. I realize all of that information is now online and with a click of a button, there it is. But there is something about the smell of all that ink on paper and the fact you can hold it and turn the pages that makes the experience of going to a phone book a pleasant one.

Besides the information included in phone books, I've found phone books the perfect places to scribble information I don't want to forget such as phone numbers of people not from the area and favorite places to call for pizza or doctors' numbers you may need in a hurry. One of my aunts was the one in our family to go to for the latest information on family members. She'd update phone numbers and addresses of family members as new members came along or moved away. Her diligence was appreciated. She was our 'Keeper of Family Information.' She herself was like a human phone book.

When I was little, I remember my mother taking the phone book to work with her as Christmas was approaching. She worked nights at Hepburn Hospital as Charge Nurse in the ER. Those were the days when everyone sent everyone they knew a Christmas card. My mother wrote out a list of names and took the phone book with her to look up addresses if she had a moment to do so when at work. I loved looking her list over. Loved seeing her beautiful penmanship, writing names on a piece of paper, making sure she didn't forget to send someone a Christmas card. Using the phone book insured she had their addresses. Those not listed in the phone book were neatly written inside the phone book.

When looking at all of my phone books stacked on top of one other, it is interesting to see how the depth of phone books slowly was reduced as phones became our lifeline to the world, taking photos, paying bills, calling individuals, providing us information just like a phone book.

But they will never be like a phone book. For most, that is just fine. But for me, I prefer all of those pages bound together and kept in a drawer.