“The old phones came to be indispensable to anyone who longed for a complex social and emotional and aesthetic life, a reliable vocal-auditory miracle, intimacy, friendship, romance, furious down-slammings, hissed interruptions and the awesomely strange sensation, via the mouth- and earpieces, of being inside someone else’s accent, intonations and sighs, ear canal and larynx and lungs.

“Your phone voice was distinctive; your phone manner was distinctive. You thought a great deal about people who rhythmically and mysteriously inhaled and exhaled cigarette smoke while they talked or left long silences or didn’t hang up immediately after saying goodbye.

“A conversation could last hours upon dazed hours, as you sat on your parents’ bed, twirling the curly cord, or hauled the house phone into the bathroom, the better to monopolize family telecommunications. Chortling, gasping, sighing, sobbing, throats catching or forming word after idle or impassioned word: you made every sound that humans make and thus joined your solitudes.”

This New York Times Magazine piece on the death of the analog phone makes me pretty nostalgic. I’d forgotten about so many of the niceties of using an “old style” phone: the pleasant weight of the receiver, mindfulness of not calling during dinner hour or after 9 p.m., and the feeling of surprised importance when your presence was requested on the line by a faux-receptionist sister (“It’s for you.”). I count myself lucky to have grown up with such a stolid and dependable mechanism. In fact, in my house we answered the phone “Feldmann’s,” like it was a grocery store or a bar. Odd, in retrospect — but even more odd that babies today create imaginary cellphones out of blocks and hold them up to their heads, murmuring hellos and goodbyes and “Can you hear me now?”, but in tiny burbling toddler words. (True story. My friend’s nephew would always play with “his phone” like this.)

What do you miss about the phone?