The Coonridge Digest: A moment’s dreaming

Greetings from the Ridge.

Sometimes justice prevails. Sometimes righteousness triumphs. Sometimes God smiles upon you and winks.

It was the monthly meeting of our Ladies Auxiliary Fellowship Guild and I was sitting in the back row, minding my own business and paying no attention to business of the club. Then it happened. Lola Albright’s cell phone went off.

Lola is a woman I’ve come to avoid since she got a cell phone. Truth be told,

I never hankered up to her much before she bought the damnedable thing, but

since she began living on her portable phone I’ve taken to avoiding places where there’s even a hint of her coming.

Like so many cell phone users, Lola uses her phone as a proclamation to the world that "Look! I really am important! I’m getting a call!"

Lola used to have children with memories. Now they have cell phones. It’s been Lola’s dream to have little Franklin and Eloise tied to her apron strings for the rest of their lives and now that they all have cell phones, Lola’s dream is complete. They call mom between classes, they call mom as they’re leaving school, they call mom when they get up in the morning and when they’re not calling mom, she’s calling them.

And of course this is in addition to the hundreds of calls and text messages the little poops receive and send from their friends throughout the day. The poor kids are growing up with absolutely no concept of what it’s like to be gone and on your own for even an hour.

So? Lola’s phone went off in the middle of the treasurer’s report. It was Eloise checking in between math and P.E. We all feel like we’ve raised her kids since Lola talks to them with a volume that lets us all share the most intimidate details of their upbringing.

Lola finished her call then did something that floored me. She went to the bathroom and left the phone on the pew. The woman had no more than left the room when the phone went off again. Louise had probably forgotten to say goodbye and it had been a full fifteen seconds before she’d talked to her mother.

I discreetly reached over, grabbed the phone and started pushing buttons to quell the sound of what sounded like "Hey Jude" played on tinker toys. The phone kept ringing, so I slammed the thing up against the hymnbook rack, sending a shower of offertory envelopes to the carpet. Still, Hey Jude persisted. Flummoxed, I tilted my body to starboard, inched the offending phone under my right hip, then came down with a thud and a furry. The Beatles were now not only disrupting the meeting, but they were jiggling my underwear to a degree that would make Eleanor Rigby wriggle.

It’s hard to be subtle when retrieving a vibrating phone from under your right cheek, but I managed, then dropped the thing to the carpet. By now the entire Ladies Guild was turning to look at me, assuming it was my phone. I had no choice. I dropped the thing onto the floor, placed my right heel onto the idiotic thing. I stomped once… twice. The ringing persisted.

The Coonridge Ladies Auxiliary Fellowship Guild is a rather formal group and I try to leave my tennis shoes at home. Such was the case on this day and I had the benefit of a pair of size 10 dress shoes as I began grindin’ and grindin’ and grindin’. I could hear the sound of plastic phone buttons popping off, glass cracking, and the plastic case screeching under the weight of my foot. The phone had long stopped ringing, but I was still grinding.

The Guild members turned around to tend to their business, but I was a woman possessed and I continued to grind the little communicator from hell into the gnarled weave of the Methodist carpet.

That’s when I caught sight of the returning Lola enter the room. I quickly scooped up what stray parts I could find, and handed them to her in a plastic pile. "Here, Lola," I smiled. "It dropped onto the floor. Sorry."

Well, the poor woman’s world had come to an end. She knew that out there somewhere poor little Louise had to dress for P.E. all alone. Franklin was about to write an English essay without mommy vibrating in his pocket. The world, at least as Lola knew it, had just shattered into a mess of wires and computer chips.

I’ll admit that it did bother me to finally wake from my slumber and discover that I’d just destroyed our TV’s remote control, but oh the joy of precious moment’s dreaming.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.