What Is Possible

Saturday morning, I was sitting at my desk, probably doing exactly what I'm doing now, or something very like.

My phone rang - the generic tone (ABBA's "Ring, Ring") - and I had to dig it out of my backpack. The number appeared, but no name. I answered anyway, because not knowing is worse than the guilt of hanging up on a pernicious salesman. Besides, I don't hang up on salesmen. I can usually get a pretty good conversation out of them, and I get desperate after a long week of reading.

"Hello" was all I said. I didn't sound excited, but I don't think I sounded disparaging either. I don't know. Whoever it was hung up.

I was sitting at the computer, so I looked the number up in the reverse directory. It's a local landline, but it would cost $15 or more to find out whose.

In 1962, Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin made a movie called If a Man Answers in which her French  mother calls her, and hangs up if she hears a man's voice just to make him a little jealous. It's a gimmick used in several sixties films, including the Rod Taylor, Doris Day film Do Not Disturb (1965). In the eighties, it was a kind of joke that you could call up your crush, and then hang up if you got scared. Caller ID had not yet been invented, but everybody had a telephone.

When I was ten, sometime in the eighties I think, a boy called me. I wish he had just hung up. He told me he knew where I lived, and that he watched me through my window. He told me he was going to come to my house and kill me. He repeated it, several times.

And yet Saturday morning I answered. But the person hung up.

So you see, the range of possibilities to explain a phonecall on a Saturday morning are quite broad, even merely drawing from my own experiences. It could be my bespoke murderer. It could be a timid admirer. Probability declares it is almost definitely simply a wrong number, realized when the person calling unexpectedly heard a female voice (if my voice is recognizable as female, of which I am never certain, especially on telephones). It is even possible, if not likely that it was a switchboard error, or somebody testing the line. Was it my NSA spooks? That would also be interesting.

But you see, somewhere in my brain, I find it possible that I could have an admirer. Not likely, but my brain does go there.

My little sister had a baby VERY early this morning. She probably doesn't think her love is like a storybook story, but her brand new little daughter is twenty kinds of magic, and the mom is twenty kinds of magic, and their little family has all the love. Her shocking red hair, the way she refuses to wake up, the way her dad coos and her mom cuddles, and the way that she's a little person with a whole future of possibilities. . . It's not just a metaphor. It's magic.