The Phone Booth

I stopped at a mountain gas station this morning, between hillsides spread with leaves about to turn spotted with the scarlet flashes of the precocious maples.

At the corner of the building, empty of its original instrument, was a phone booth.

I was reminded of the path from the road up to my university campus. The campus, prior to being bought by the college some twenty years before I attended, had been a Catholic boys’ school and monastery. Major renovations had taken place, but around the campus there were a few remnants of its former existence.

One of those remnants, at a bend in the aforementioned path was an empty icon shelf. It sat there, quietly growing over with vines, a reminder that things sometimes outlive their original purposes and find new existence as a ruin.

Someone had set their empty coffee cup on the vacant phone booth. Another had graffitied the upper corner.

A few years ago, in another phase of renovation, the university tore down that old icon shelf, ending it’s physical existence altogether and leaving it a mere remnant of memory, a story I could one day tell my children if I took them to Homecoming.

I suppose someday all the empty phone booths will be torn down as well…and they will become just a remnant of cultural memory. And to keep them from passing away altogether, we’ll tell our children and grandchildren stories of trying to find a phone booth and hoping we could find a quarter in our pocket to make a call.