![]() All I could remember about it was that you could play Pong on it. In 1979, he bought a computer for Christmas. When he was in the Army, he wanted to be a pilot, but he had terrible eyesight like me and wasn’t allowed. My dad loved Star Trek and science and space and technology. “You wouldn’t believe how much everything has changed. Oh my god,” I said in a kind of excitement. I usually listen to an audiobook but today there was this phone booth and-” “I’m-” How was I supposed to answer this question? “In a field near my house in Indiana. ![]() What remained in my memory was more of an outline than a person, just a vague sense of his presence, the shape and weight and solidity of someone at the periphery. My dad died in 1983, the summer I turned eight. “What are you doing here? There? Wherever you are.” Which was weird, because I didn’t know I remembered it. Small and faraway, but I recognized it instantly. When they settled, I heard a voice answering on the other end. Outside, the crows clacked and clattered up in a circle. There was no dial tone, just something in the silence on the other end, like a presence in a room or eyes secretly watching. Still, I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear. It seemed colder inside the booth than it did outside, even though I was blocked from the wind. Just beyond them, I found a narrow spot in the creek with a flat rock in the center and hopped across. I passed under the bare-branched sycamores where crows roosted, flocked together for warmth. It was strange enough that I had to check it out. Like something you’d see in the first Terminator movie, just before Arnold Schwarzenegger is beamed down naked onto the streets of Los Angeles in a crackle of sci-fi lightning. The graffiti scribbled over the scratched windows and the dented blue door were straight out of the 1980s. It appeared on the far side of the creek, sprouting up like a mushroom overnight. That was where I found the phone booth one raw November day. It wasn’t pretty, but it was a little scrap of nature. Migrating geese stopped in the puddles, and hawks sometimes hunted from the tops of the utility poles. The dog died, but I kept taking the same walk. Back when I had a dog, I walked the dog there on the path that winds along the creek. It’s where the old RCA factory stood before the city tore it down. I used to take walks along a patch of scruffy waste ground a couple of blocks from my house in Indiana.
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