The Phone Books of Our Lives

Whether it is a Dex, McPherson, or whatever local phone book you may have for your area; like clockwork every year a new and updated phone book will be sitting at your front door. There is an old ad slogan that goes "let your fingers do the walking."  This suggests that you can find anything you are looking for by merely two stepping with your fingers across the Yellow Pages of the phone book.

For the same sort of convenient information reference, most homes also have a more personal self made phone book. They are readily available at any drug or business supply store and come in a variety of sizes and colors. They all have tabbed alphabetical section dividers and the pages are lined for neat and organized use. But if you are like me, our home phone book (since ours is the color gold we refer to it as "the gold book") is anything but neat and organized. Unlike the mass distributed commercial phone book, our home phone book does not get updated every year. It will instead get added to from time to time. But, with this added information also comes scratched out numbers, scribbled in new numbers, and names and numbers written on Post It notes stuck to pages.  Also in our phone book, those alphabetical tabs may or may not give lead to information necessarily beginning with that particular letter of the alphabet. Often time's numbers are stored under the letter of someones first name simply because I can't remember their last name, or never new it to begin with. A phone number may be listed under the letter "C" for "cousins," where you will find a list of my cousin's names with their phone numbers. Those blank dividing pages that hold the alphabetical letter tag also make very good scratch paper while you are talking to some one on the phone. For instance, I know I can always go back to the "C" page and find the cookie recipe that my Dad gave me years ago.

 Plus, along with an assortment of Chinese food and pizza menus of restaurants from all of the towns that we have lived in, the front and back inside pockets are bulging with pages of typed phone lists from fire departments and from churches we have attended dating back to 1980.  

Yes, our phone book has "seen its day".  But, it is a collection of friends and family of our lives that can also be considered a time capsule of sorts. Leafing through the menus and listings of people and businesses that are assembled in this tattered and dated phone book, I can recall the times and places of our life lived. This sort of organized chaos is indicative of why I don't scrap book and why I rarely have my Christmas shopping done until December 24^Th. 

Oh, I could go out and get a new home phone book and transfer names and numbers from the old one to achieve an updated and current source of information. But I like to think of it as, growing old together.  Just as there is still more room in the cover pockets and pages of that old phone book, there is still room in our lives for more friends and family with changing names and phone numbers that we can meet up with at new favorite restaurants with take out menus.