Who Will Answer?

Very sad to see in the paper that former Associated Press sportswriter Gordon Beard has passed away. He did a great job covering the Orioles for many years, wrote a wonderful book (Birds On The Wing) about the 1966 championship season, and was always respected as the funniest man in the press box. Beard also was a lexicographer, who published volume after volume of compendia of Baltimore expressions.

You know how we love our "lemon moran" pie here, expecially in Dezember!

Anyway, the obituary included reference to a funny moment in Beard's high school days. This being Baltimore, one's high school is more indicative of status and culture than any other handy touchstone, so let it be said he went to Southern High. One day a physics teacher asked the class what happened when a body is immersed in water.

"The phone rings," quipped young Gordon.

I bring this up because there was that time in our lives when the phone rang and you didn't care if you were in a bath or in flagrante delicto - you were gonna answer that phone. It was like a constitutional obligation to pick it up and go, "hello?" I mean, really, you could be hauling a baby grand piano down to the basement because young Eloise was going to start "taking piano" from that thin, prim young lady around the corner, and if that phone rang, you'd tell your brother-in-law, who was sweating down on the keyboard end of things, to "hold what you got." You just had to answer the phone. No matter if it was the Purple Heart, calling to see if you had anything to leave out on the porch for Tuesday's pickup, or that thin, prim young lady, calling to see if Eloise had her pinafore starched yet, that phone HAD to be answered.

Then when answering machines and caller ID came along, you started to feel the icy hands of Phone Screening standing between you and that cutey patootie you had just spent an hour wrenching up enough guts to call. You just knew she was looking at the caller ID screen and saying,"Oh it's HIM!!! I'm just not gonna answer!" And there you were; another Saturday night at Hoops Alone Saloon, the sports bar for lonely sports.

Now that everyone has a cell phone, chances are they have the cell right in the shower with them, lest they miss some important call from, well, you! But still with the screening!

And you know another move bound to induce paranoia? When you call some office and ask to speak to Mr. Kaputnick, and his assistant or whoever says, instead of, "He's not here", a simple, "Who may I say is calling?" That means he or she runs off to Kaputnick and says,"It's Norm Peterson - did you want to speak with him?" and he says no and she comes back with "Mr. Kaputnick has stepped out; did you want to leave a message?" And you just KNOW that Kaputnick is sitting there surfing www.biguns. com or playing online euchre.

And it all would have been so easy if he had simply picked up the phone! He would have, if you had called him in 1957.