My dad lived on the phone.
I don't think he was able to function without his bright yellow Nextel attached to his hand. It was ginormous and weighed a ton, but was durable I suppose because he could have thrown that thing off a building and it would have taken the licking and kept on ticking.
When it wasn't in use, he wore it on his belt, naturally also WITH his suspenders (He was a very stylish man after all). Usually under a t-shirt from a flea market, with the embroidered name of its previously intended owner tattered off with the help of the jack-knife he kept in his pocket at all times.
The t-shirts often had traces of whatever he had for lunch in spots atop his belly, and a few drips of light brown from his morning coffee (Milk no sugar, thank you). He often smelled of sweat and sawdust, and as unappealing as that odor was to me at the time, if I could bottle it now as a sort of odiferous reminder of him to whip out and sniff from time to time in his memory I would in a heartbeat.
His phone etiquette, however, was a little "off".
Pretty much daily would call people out of the blue and ask "Is this you?" He was either double checking in jest or had actually completely forgotten who he was calling in the first place. We were never quite certain. (He also lacked a little thing called volume control and I am certain anyone within a 3-mile radius could have possibly picked up on his conversations.)
"Is this you?"
"No Dad, it's someone else."
His Nextel quirks where a little more random.
*Chirp*
"What's my Dylan doing?"
*Chirp*
"He's sleeping Dad."
*Chirp*
"Why?"
*Chirp*
"That's what babies do Dad."
Dylan at the time was maybe 2 months old.
Other times he would ask to talk to Dylan, via Nextel. Granted he didn't actually talk yet, but he asked nonetheless.
To this day every time I hear a Nextel go off, I automatically hear those words in my head.
*Chirp*
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