Revised slightly after finding my old smartPhone.
Even Saying “I Lost My Phone” is embarrassing; is how I started this post when I thought I had lost it. How does somebody lose their phone, anyway? I still don’t know because, although I thought I lost my phone, I didn’t. I thought I lost it at home, but it turned out it was in the Hyundai driver’s door pocket, which both Michele and I had checked at least three times each.
The phone is an HTC, and for the last couple of years, Michele has been saying, “You need a new phone; this one is sooo old.” I kept telling Michele, “Why get a new phone when this one still works?” As a disclaimer, I probably don’t need to make, I am not a heavy phone user, which means that I am not a phone connoisseur or even a reliable judge on whether a phone is working well. I use the phone as a phone – only occasionally and somewhat reluctantly – use the night sky object identification app, the What Mountain Is This app, read the news when I’m standing in a line or waiting for a doctor, and use the timer all the time. Oh, I am also a heavy user of Google Maps and Ways.
I rarely use the camera, although that might change. While the phone was hiding from us, and we both thought it was lost, Michele bought me a Google Pixel 7 Pro. The Pixel is a much better tool; it fits my hand much better as a phone and is almost infinitely more intuitive, and I already miss my old HTC (but not enough to charge it). It reminds me of my second car; like my second car, the THC was almost unbreakable. And quirkily reliable.
Years ago, many, many years ago, when I was about 16 -17, my parents wanted me to buy my grandparents’ car because my grandfather had died and my grandmother didn’t drive. The car sat in their driveway, exfoliating in the hot Santa Rosa sun. The car was a 1948 Pontiac Chiefton 4 door, with faded blue paint and perfect, grey, velour upholstery. It had chrome stripes on the hood and an orange hood ornament that lit up when the lights were turned on. Still, this was back when Pontiac was just a slightly more expensive Chevrolet so it was far from delux. The car was eleven years old, and I paid three hundred dollars for it. On the way home from my grandparents, the car stopped on the highway; it just stopped. It turned out there was rust in the gas tank because the car hadn’t been driven in years, so the opening sequence was getting it towed to a shop nearer home. I did not think it was a good omen.
But, it turned out, it was a very good car; it was simple, rugged, sort of reliable, simple, and easy to fix. I put a lot of miles on that car on dirt roads and learned the value of good tires and driving fast enough not to get stuck. One time, on a dirt road north of Chester, California, we ran into a group of three jeeps parked next to a shallow creek with a small bank on the other side that other people had oviously driven up. The drivers were strategizing their creek crossing, and we stopped and talked to them – rolled-down window style – for a couple of minutes. Then we just backed up, drove across the creek at the high end of a reasonable speed, and bashed up the bank on the other side, leaving them still wondering if they should get their jeeps wet. The Pontiac was that kind of practicle vehicle.
When I went away to college, I sold the car to a friend for $25.00 and a Heathkit stereo. A couple of years later, he sold it to another friend for $25.00, and after a couple of years of banging around Colorado back roads, it broke down on a road near Long’s Peak. Our friend says he walked out, but he probably hitched. I like to think that the Pontiac is still there, slowly rusting back into the landscape.
My now-defunct HTC was a lot like the Pontiac. Anyway, the point also is that, when I got the car from my grandparents, they had covered the soft grey velour upholstery with a thick, clear vinyl covering. I never understood that. When I got it, the paint was shot, the car rattled driving down any road that wasn’t very smooth, and the windows noisily leaked air at any speed above thirty, but the upholstery was brand new. And I’ve since transferred that non-understanding of my grandparents’ vinyl to not understanding putting bras on the front of cars – mostly Porches, it seems -to putting covers on smartphones. At first, I followed the social pressure and put a cover on my HTC, but I liked how the phone looked – it has a beautiful, rounded glass back – so I took the cover off. Over the last couple of years, the phone had been dropped on hardwood floors, sidewalks, and even the street once. The day I thought I lost it, the phone still looked almost new. It still does.