Thursday, July 10, 2025

Phone Booths and Parking Meters


                                                        "Phone Booth R.I.P." -- Photo by Dan Noyes


Recently, a plastic bag suddenly showed up filled with my possessions from when my car was sold 18 months ago… (This is from 2021.)

When that sale happened, I was in a skilled nursing facility after my stroke, relearning how to walk, not worrying whether I would ever drive a car again.

The bag resembled what they give you after a person has died, i.e., their last possessions.

I didn’t die and neither did my car — but it left me for somebody else, as did my girlfriends, my jobs, and my ideas from 3 a.m. The car was a symbol of the independence I yearned for inside that nursing home when I was strapped down in beds with alarms on each side to guard against yet another fall.

As I sorted through the stuff in the bag, I found a bunch of quarters, maybe $4-5 worth, that I kept in the car for parking meters or phone booths. That's back when you needed cash to park legally and when pay phones were still a thing.

I really needed those quarters when I was fetching my kids at school or dropping them off at soccer practice, or when we were picking up take-out Mexican or Chinese. My youngest daughter, who always had my back, saved quarters for this very purpose, and gave them to me whenever she noticed I was running low.

Along with the coins, there was a faded press pass that gave me access to the gaming company Zynga's headquarters when I was a tech blogger for BNET and 7x7.

But most of what spilled out of the bag were the old CDs that I used to play in the car as I was shuttling my kids here and there. Often our trips were short -- fifteen minutes or so, and I'd try to pick songs that would finish before we reached our destination.

Part of the reason I did that, as any parent knows, is that your kids don’t talk much when they are teenagers and it is a good idea to have some music to fill the void.

So we had Elton John, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles but most memorably Johnny Cash. For some reason his version of "Highway Patrolman," written by Bruce Springsteen, was one of our enduring family favorites. It's a long take (5:20) and more than once, I remember us sitting in the car waiting for it to finish before we got out to proceed on with our business.

Of course we had all heard how the story ends a hundred times before, but we still had a minute or two left before we'd be late for whatever we were going to, so we let it roll.

So you see, everything in that plastic bag had a story, and I’m glad I’m here to tell it to you.

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