The Voice in the Box
When I was quite young, my family had one of the first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember well the polished the wooden case fastened to the wall on the lower stair landing. But my first personal experience with this genie-in-the-receiver came one day while my mother was visiting a neighbor. Amusing myself at the tool bench, I hurt my finger with a hammer. The pain was terrible, but there didn’t seem to be much use crying, because there was no one home to offer sympathy. I walked around the house, and finally arriving at the stairway. The telephone! Quickly I ran for the footstool and dragged it to the landing. Climbing up, I unhooked the receiver and held it to my ear. “Information Please,” I said into the mouthpiece just above my head.
A click or two, and a small, clear voice spoke into my ear, “Information.”
“I hurt my finger…” I cried into the phone. The tears came readily enough, now that I had an audience.
“Isn’t your mother home?” came the question.
“Nobody’s home but me.” I sobbed.
“Are you bleeding?”
“No,” I replied. “I hit my finger with the hammer and it hurts.”
“Can you open your icebox?” she asked. I said I could. “Then break off a little piece of ice and hold it on your finger. That will stop the hurt. Be careful when you use the icepick(冰锥),” she said, “And don’t cry. You’ll be all right.”
After that, I called Information Please for everything. I asked her for help with my geography and she told me where Philadelphia was, and the Orinoco, the romantic river that I was going to explore when I grew up. She helped me with my arithmetic, and she told me that my pet chipmunk----I had caught him in the park just the day before----would eat fruit and nuts.
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