telephone_number ovenbird When our minds were too young and open to contain anything as mundane as numerical facts, my mother made up a song so we could remember our phone number. “My telephone number is all mine, and it starts with the number nine” my brother and I sang. My mother stitched that number right into the fabric of my being so I would never lose it. It was the number that meant home, the number that meant safety, the number that meant reaching the people who would come to get you no matter how late or how much trouble you were in. Tomorrow is the last day I’ll be able to dial that number and have it connect me to a landline sitting in the living room of my parents’ house. Tomorrow is the last day that my parents will be on the other end of that number. They are moving just outside of the city I grew up in and can’t bring the number with them. On Tuesday I will have to dial a new number. One that starts with the number two. One that doesn’t match the melody or meter of the song my mother wrote so my brother and I could remember how to call home. There’s nothing special about a string of random digits. Not really. But my fingers dialed them from rotary phones, from touch-tone phones, from phones at my friends’ houses, from payphones downtown. I called using international calling cards from Europe. I called long distance from British Columbia. I’ve called that number multiple times a week for twenty years since moving away from home for good. It’s the number I wrote on slips of paper and handed to people I hoped might love me. Knowing that I will only dial it one more time feels like something breaking. I keep singing the song in my head: “My telephone number is all mine.” Will it belong to someone else one day? If I call six months from now will I reach a stranger who says I have the wrong number? If I were to hear the voice on the other end of the line would I recognize it somehow? My telephone number is now an organ waiting to be transplanted. I want to know who will carry it in their chest. I want to know that they’re worthy. 260510 what's it to you? who go blather from