my sister's amazing discovery in the basement

I asked my sister if her tenants downstairs had moved out this weekend like they were supposed to (turns out they were a door-slamming bunch as well) and she said (in her own words... as a guest columnist!):

Yes they did, and funny story . Jake and Jill left a lot of stuff in the basement and claimed that it "was there when we got here" but strangely enough, I found Victoria Secret boxes that said "Congratulations on your Wedding Jill" and about fifty boxes from LLBean, which is where Jake's mom worked.

So needless to say I'm annoyed, and upstairs meanwhile, Scott's taking down the ceiling in their old apartment. There was a big hole and so naturally, I asked "is there any secret treasure up there?" The house was built in 1920 so I KNOW that somewhere in there, there is something valuable and/or interesting. But alas, nothing in the ceiling per usual (the same thing happened with the upstairs floor, we got a fake wig and a old broken wooden box -- I left a quarter down there for the next guy).


More proof that all the crap was theirs was the discovery of a phone. Jake was from Maine and the phone has a 207 area code on it. Scott's giving me this report while I'm at work.
So at my office, I have those old school phones that you had in the 80s, no caller ID, regular push pad buttons, mine is grey but they make them in off white too. There isn't even a little red light for when you get voicemail and there are two settings for the ringer-on and off. You control it on the bottom of the phone with this dial type thingie. They make my neck hurt so I got a stick-on shoulder booster uppper. But that fell off. I tried to glue it back on with a hot glue gun. It worked for a while and then it fell off again but I couldn't get the hot glue off the receiver so I had to covertly swap out my phone after hours with some unsuspecting new guy.

But I digress...Later that day when I arrive home, I walk into their old apartment and there it is.
It is the most amazing thing I have seen in a long time and I am in love.

It is a perfect, red, rotary phone.


I take it out of the filth and mire of the junk pile and bring it over to my chair for thorough washing. It's mesmerizing. It's so old that on the bottom of the phone it says "property of New England Bell." Mr. What Are You 100 (aka Scott) tells me that back in the proverbial day, you couldn't buy phones, you had to lease them from the phone company, just like a cable box.
It's covered with dust but other than that, not a scratch on it. It's like there was an ice age in my basement in 1973 and the phone was perfectly preserved. I gingerly rub it with a rag, sticking the corner of the towel into the zero and spinning it just like I was dialing. I notice there is no Z and on the 0, it says operator.

I want to take it to work. It matches my work phone exactly. I want to make it the fake emergency line at my desk. But I can't. I leave it on the counter and look at it some more. Scott picks it up and carries it around by the handle that's meant to carry it around by. "You do this while you twirl the cord around," he mimics himself when he was 16 talking on the phone. I pick it up and put it to my ear, like I'm going to hear something. It's not even plugged in. I don't even know if it would work on our phone line what with all the new fangled digital subscriber line stuff. But there is something about it that I can't even describe. I put it back on the counter.

"You're not really taking that to work are you," he asks. I said,"No, I'll leave it here so we can play with it for a little while."