I recently read an obit that included a link that enabled mourners to send Sympathy Flowers. I followed the link to a website full of lovely floral arrangements with names like:

Heartfelt Condolences Peaceful Passages Beautiful Spirit Farewell Too Soon Here’s the problem. Not every dead person was a perfect, loving saint. The death of a loved one often leaves us filled, not just with grief and sorrow, but with anger, hurt, resentment, and countless unpleasant emotions.

So how about some floral tributes for these folks? Let me suggest: Gone But Not Forgiven You Owe Me Money Maybe Now You’ll Finally Stop Drinking Don’t You Dare Rest in Peace While I Have Unresolved Issues!

Roses are Red/ Violets are Blue/ Six Feet Underground/ Is a Great Place for You You Were Never There for Me. Now You’re Really Not There for Me.

If You Left All Your Money to the Local Cat Shelter Instead of Me, I Swear I’m Going to Dig You Up and Kill You Again You’re with Jesus Now and I Bet He Doesn’t Like You Any More Than We Did Sound a little harsh? Cold? Unfeeling? If so, let me leave you with the words of the immortal Moms Mabley: “They say you shouldn’t say anything about the dead unless it’s good. He’s dead. Good!”

Decisions, decisions…. This past month we have replaced a toilet and our phone system. Sounds simple, right? It used to be!

Carol Cook recently had the same problem and shared the following… An older toilet in my home was circa 1970; when flushed it sounded like water rushing over a waterfall. It was worn out, constantly dripped, and required five gallons of water to enact a flush. So, what, you say; well, it only worked sporadically, finally refusing to work at all, which is not something you can ignore.

The rescuing plumber stated, “the old girl was beyond help and needed replacing”, besides I was breaking a water usage law! A new, up to code toilet would have to be purchased. If shopping for a toilet hasn’t been on your to-do list for the last ten years you are in for a surprise. Become perplexed at this unnerving experience and shocked at the price to purchase and install a toilet.

Discovering toilets came in well over twenty different types to choose from was baffling, but the biggest surprise? The government requires all toilets installed in our home to be “water friendly and environmentally monitored.”

That’s right, we are required to install low-flow toilets with an efficient flushing system to save our water resources and please our law makers. Yep, our rights have been flushed with a law of 1.6 gallons of water per flush! However, the most bewildering task; find a suitable one.

There is the standard low flow, a high performance or gravity assisted one, or a syphon action flushing type. Choose the wide flapper valve for better flushing or stay with the regular twoinch valve. Select a sleek skirted trap way design, a round or elongated style with a purist look, or opt for a single or dual flush! Then choose porcelain white or cream, or various colors for a price, one with modern subtle curves and clean lines, or with sleek symmetry. There is also a choice for a push button flusher or a left or right handle flusher. Then decide on a seat type, a quiet close seat, a regular seat, or a lighted seat option. See what I mean!

Oh Lord I pray, protect our bathrooms from the government toilet police, those ecology nuts, and Congress humans from enacting anymore rules for our commodes, the john, the throne, or as the British refer to it, the loo. Whatever you call it, at least pray the environmentalist are finally satisfied.

—CC—

Now, let’s talk about our telephone problem. We still have a landline telephone. After many years, our old telephone quit working. All I knew for sure is that I wanted to keep my landline. Oldtimers like myself and Ron Carlson remember when… The landline was once our connection. For almost a hundred years, it was the model for talking to someone who was not in the room with us. The telephone wire plugged into the wall jack, and the phone wires ran from the house to the perfectly named telephone pole, and from that pole and all of its stalwart cousins standing along our streets, those wires found the people we would talk to on what was called the telephone.

We had a telephone on the little desk in the kitchen. For years the phone would ring, the beautiful sonorous periodic ringing that alerted us all that a call was coming in — someone had dialed our number! — and my mother would answer it. My father, unless he was there alone, did not answer the telephone because it fell under the duties of the household, I think, and he was a welder who was away all day fixing things and didn’t come home to answer the phone. After some years, we had another phone. Not another line, but another phone. When that happened, when people achieved two phones, it was thought far and wide to be a sort of luxury, a phone in the kitchen and one upstairs, so indulgent and in fact sort of lazy in that you wouldn’t have to come down to answer the phone, but you could simply turn there in the bedroom and take the call. It was the beginning of taking a call while not fully dressed.

When the phone rang in our house, we didn’t know who it was. I want to say it could have been anybody, but it couldn’t have been anybody. It was one of four or five people who had our number. We generally knew what they would say by what time the phone rang. Morning calls were certain people, neighbors, and early evening were relatives looking to chat. We didn’t want any calls after 10 or 11 at night, and we lived in fear of any call after midnight. My father said we should unplug it when we went to bed so that no one would have dire trouble in the night.

The telephone didn’t ring a dozen times a day, and its sound was a kind of minor event. Kids didn’t pick up the phone. I didn’t get a phone call until I was 12, if then. My mother would pick up the ringing phone and say hello and we all knew in a moment whom she was talking to, and her voice as she spoke to one of her sisters or my father or a friend was the tenor of the house. We didn’t listen to what she said, but we knew by her tone what the world was like.

There were films and stories in which the people in the dark, lonely house lifted the telephone receiver to find it dead, the wires cut. Sometimes we saw the gloved hand and the wire cutters snip the cord outside in the night. They were cut off! No communication in or out! The people on the island were getting murdered one by one, and there were heavy clues about who would be next, and all of this because the lines were down or cut or out of service. None of this: “Can you hear me now?” It was: “No one can possibly hear us now.” People were alone. Now, of course, the people on the island, as soon as there is any mischief, all send text messages with photos along with voicemails from their cellphones. So, everybody is safer, but our stories have taken a mortal blow from the fact that no one now is ever alone. No one is going to write a film where the bad guy goes around with his tiny little snippers and clips the internal diode in each cellphone. And most of the time, in the world that offered that special condition — being alone — as a possibility, it was a good thing. We miss it.

There is a moment we also miss, which was a wondrous landline moment. The phone would ring after dinner, and my brother would answer it and say hello, and after a moment, he would holler, “Ronnie! It’s for you.” The phrase is long gone because no one shares a phone anymore. And my brother would call me loudly enough to wake the house, the downstairs and the upstairs. I was 16 and the phone was for me! But he wouldn’t stop there.

He would ask, as he’d been instructed in phone etiquette, who was calling, and then he would yell, at the same terrific volume, “It’s Joylene!,” a name that had never been said aloud before in my house and the sound of which would arouse in all listeners, mainly my mother and father and little brother, the same alertness as if he had said, “There is an alligator in the house! A big one!” I would spring from my bed, throwing to the floor (sacrilege!) the new issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland I’d been studying, and sprint down the stairs, sweat bursting from my forehead before he could add what I heard him say as I turned the slippery corner into the kitchen: “Ronnie, it’s Joylene, a girl from school!” Then I would yank the phone from him, ignoring his grin, and say hello to Joylene, the nicest girl in the 10th grade, in such a way as to make it sound like, “Yes, who’s calling and why are you bothering me?” And no matter that she needed to know what time I would pick her up for the sophomore dance tomorrow night, I would answer in monosyllables, listening hard to the old telltale clues of our house so I could hear the residents creeping closer in the hall to hear what Ronnie was saying to Joylene: yes, no, okay, yes, sure, okay. Bye. And standing there in the kitchen in a household with a landline, I knew that the news was now public. Ronnie was taking Joylene to the dance. The village had been alerted.

This is the information we’re not getting now.

- Ron Carlson —CC—

And like many other things, I miss those days.

Our first phone was on a party line when I was a youngster and I loved