Mrs. Teabody Goes Cell-less

"When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose." ~ Dylan

Good Morning, Gentle Reader. Here on Mrs. Teabody's mountain, all is enshrouded in fog, and like her fellow sufferers, Mrs Teabody is engaged in the most unattractive process of emptying her noggin of the launched battle of her sinuses, tissue box and wastebasket at the ready. A piping hot cuppa Bon Jour is making the process marginally less hideous. But today is not the day to discuss how tragically unseemly the battle with pollen can be. No. Today Mrs. Teabody wishes to share with you the details of her latest misadventure which begins and ends with a cellular phone.

One assumes you have a cellular phone, Gentle Reader? Of course you do. No one can escape its ubiquity. Perhaps yours is one kept for road emergencies or, perhaps, at the spectrum's opposite end, yours is one that behaves as an assistant, holding all manner of precious data or as  a singular friend, offering up distraction and amusement. No matter. A cellular phone is one more fiddly thing to keep track of -- like one's American Express card or Life alert bracelet. And therein is the rub.

The Teabodys keep a cellular phone coffin on a shelf in their closet. Once the lid is prised open, one gazes upon a plethora of attachments, chargers and thick manuals in multiple languages in miniscule print. The Teabodys have had to resort to borrowing from the coffin on a few occasions and such an occasion presented itself Friday last when it was discovered that the darling Duchess Ming, who has a penchant for chewing on pens until she explodes ink on the champagne carpet, had taken it upon herself to chomp along on the recharging cord  on Mrs. Teabody's most current cellular phone, an especially odious one with sliding parts-- one of Mr. Teabody's rejects put back into use after Mrs. Teabody's favorite phone somehow found its way into the water closet. Mon Dieu! Mrs. Teabody has never felt any fondness for this particular instrument, but there it is. And now it was unusable because there was no means of recharging it. That is why Mrs. Teabody found herself at the start of a traveling weekend with a cellular phone that was at least a decade old. This inconvenience was further exacerbated when it was discovered somewhere along mile marker 183 that the recharging cord brought along was not a match for the ancient phone. Now Mrs. Teabody could regale you with story upon story about how hideously catastrophic all this was were it not for her very limited memory. Suffice to say, she was most happy to return to Chez Teabody where the ancient phone was promptly placed  on an ( as yet) unchewed charging cord and Mrs. T. was reconnected. A blessing, yes?

In this fashion Monday passed without incident and after a few lively conversations, Mrs. Teabody was able to salve friends' wounds made from Mrs. Teabody's lack of communication. Tuesday began well enough but ended badly when it was discovered that somewhere between the  purchase of paper towels and a takeaway pizza, the fully charged old dinosaur went missing.  And stayed missing for the better part of a day that saw Mrs. T in full investigative posture far too many times and even involved the support people at AT and T. Had it not been for the fact that the mere AGE of the cellular phone made it an unlikely target of theft, the Teabodys would have felt far more alarm. Mrs. Teabody shan't reveal how or where the missing phone was found. Suffice to say it was found in the very last place searched, Smile. AT and T were called to restore service and the ancient phone now rests lightly and fully recharged to Mrs. Teabody's left. Mrs. Teabody is, as the saying goes, "back in business."

Gentle Reader, for a full twenty-four hours, Mrs. Teabody was without the convenience of a cellular phone, but this unconnected time was not without its own blessings. The sun went down and came up. Life did not screech to an end. And using the funny old  telephone machine in the corner of Tickle Your Fancy with the big push buttons and  a "receiver" with both mouthpiece and earpiece proved to be more than adequate. Do humans really need to reveal to another human every single movement of every single day? No, they do not. Perhaps if one saved up the events of an entire day and took the time to edit out the meaningless tripe, everyone would remember why they used to enjoy phone conversations. Perhaps.

Ta for now!