Romanticizing Communication

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For the uninitiated, this is a walk-in phone booth, a wired pay phone and a paper phone book.  This is how it used to be when you wanted to call someone and you weren't at your  home or office phone.  I know, it sounds positively uncivilized in this day of carry-it-with-you, 24-hour communication.  There was something romantic, actually, about pay phone days ~

The ability to stay connected when you're on the road.  (Except when you really needed to call and there was no phone in sight, or the phone booth was phone-less thanks to vandals.)

The excitement of finding a phone booth.  (Okay, it wasn't so exciting when it smelled like a urinal or the phone didn't work.)

The sound of the money as you dropped it into the slot.  (Truly annoying, however, when you didn't have enough cash on you.)

The dependability of the leafing through the local phone book to find a number.  (That is if someone else hadn't already ripped out the page you were looking for.)

The thought that Clark Kent may have used this booth to change into his Superman outfit.  (A fantasy.)

I guess this particular phone booth was appealing to me because it sits in a dinky ocean side town surrounded by sweet smelling blossoms.  It harkens back to a time when we connected more face-to-face and less ear-to-ear or even fingers-to-fingers.  The reality is we have better communication today with our portable phone booths; the ones we carry in our pockets or purses.  But I'm going to enjoy my walk down memory lane today to the phone booths of my youth.  The ones that sat in beach side towns.  The ones that we stuffed our long, tanned legs in to ask for a ride home or make plans for that night's rendezvous.