The Incredibly Fantastic And Amazing Telephone

For as long as I can remember, I have had a casual fascination with telephones. Casual, I say, because I've never been fascinated enough to actually devote significant time or brain power toward fathoming their deeper mysteries.

Yet something about them will from time to time suddenly mystify and inspire me. At such moments, I will stare into the heavens and laugh a sly, wistful little laugh, marveling at their magic. (Then I will remind myself to--at some point--get a life.)

One such time was in December of 1994. I was in Londrina, Brazil, sitting in a small office of our local church, staring at a bright red rotary phone, waiting for it to ring for my semi-annual phone call from home. Having previously given my parents a daunting string of numbers to punch in from Colorado, I could now only sit and hope and pray that the darn thing would ring. I waited, fretted, considered that my parents may have botched the timing of the call due to time zone confusion, or that maybe an earthquake in Guatemala had snapped the telephone wire like a thread . . . and then it rang.

I picked it up desperately, composed myself, and then suddenly I was coolly speaking to my admiring parents and worshipful little brothers and sister as if they were sitting across the room. (Of note: my parents and siblings, as best as I can tell, continue their idolization of me to this day, unabated and magnified.)

How could a voice, speaking into a plastic and copper device from the other side of the planet, be transmitted in such perfect clarity (save for an incessant background clicking noise), without appreciable delay, into my homesick ears? How could sounds be instantaneously converted into electrical impulses, then relayed across tens of thousands of miles of copper wires precariously strung through mountains and jungles, across oceans and third world dictatorships, and then be reconverted into sound waves that so perfectly reproduced vocal tones and subtle inflections that I could easily discern the individual voices of my gaggle of pre-teen brothers, whose squawking sounded to me only like spasms of incomprehensible, guttural screeching?

How could it be done? It must be magic, I marveled briefly. And then I continued picking mango shreds from my teeth.

That event happened a relatively recent thirteen years ago, before the full advent of the now ubiquitous cell phone. (I believe in that same year my father had an attached company "car phone" that was roughly the size of a small microwave oven.) Cell phones have only made the telephone mystery exponentially more mystifying. How can I be sitting in my car in Chugwater, Wyoming, hit two buttons, wait for a few rings, and then be speaking to my sister in Littleton, Colorado for a brief second before she puts me on hold because she has to say goodbye to another one of her giggly friends?

What sort of genius was Alexander Graham Bell or Fred P. Motorola to figure this thing out?

Wait, don't explain it to me. First, I probably wouldn't understand it.

But second, there's something I like about not knowing, something mesmerizing, baffling, even humbling about such technology. To know how it works? That might diminish the allure, they way the thrill of a magic trick dissipates once you know the secret.

And the telephone is just one of a thousand technological marvels of our daily lives. From the time I flipped on a light switch this morning to the time I'm posting this on the internet from my home computer at night, and all of the medications and computer programs and automobiles and refrigerated foods and Sportscenter broadcasts and YouTube "debates" between sanctimonious Republican candidates in between, everything around us is a technological miracle, evidence of mankind's genius and creativity.

Some guys who are just like me (other than being a lot smarter and wealthier), figured this stuff out, harnessed the elements and the laws of physics, and brought these wonders into our living rooms.

But I'm fine not knowing all the details. Mr. Arthur C. Clarke once famously remarked, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

I love a good magic trick. So allow me the pleasure of suspending my disbelief in this one thing, of being awestruck by the quotidian telephone.

Now, if you'll please excuse me. My phone is ringing . . . again.

The Memory of Fish

Two straight posts about fish?

Not really. This one is about memory, but it was partly inspired by our resilient goldfish, Foxy.

Foxy came into our lives about two and a half years ago when some friends went on an extended trip and left him/her--how do you tell fish gender, anyway?-- with us to fish sit.

They never came back for him.

Fearing that Foxy would feel hurt and abandoned, we took him under our wings and tenderly cared for and nurtured him until one day we went on a five day trip and completely forgot about him. Upon returning home, Foxy was floating belly up in the fishbowl. I dropped some food in the bowl to see if he was really dead, and then left to find my little green fish net to transport him to his final ride down the porcelain express. But when I came back, Foxy was zooming around the bowl, lunging lustily towards his nibbles, making frisky little blooping sounds with his mouth. What a joker! Since then, I call him Resurrection Fish whenever I think about him, which, frankly, is about once every 2 months when his bowl, depleted to less than one-third its volume and coated with a murky green scum, needs cleaning.

That's when I pull out my trusty green fish net, chase Foxy around the bowl, dump him in a plastic cup with some water, and then proceed to de-slime his brackish environs.

How Foxy has survived this long, I don't know. (How long do goldfish live, anyway?)

Foxy and I don't have much of a relationship, but I am probably the second most important being in his very, very small world. The most important is Elizabeth, who feeds him everyday. I am second most important, because I am the deus ex machina that swoops down from the nether-worlds every two months, snares him in a green tractor beam and places him in solitary confinement. When Foxy emerges from this alien abduction, he is placed back into a world that has been cleansed every wit, even as if by fire.

The point is . . . what? I can't remember, which actually IS the point: remembering.

And now here is my profound thought: does Foxy remember any of this? In the midst of our little bi-monthly Master / Fish interactions, I sometimes think I can see some trace of anticipation in Foxy's beady little eyes when I lug his bowl towards the sink and produce the Green Wand of Mystical Powers. There seems to be a little more swagger to his swim, more purpose to his puckering, more flibber to his jibber. But in reality, I think I'm fooling myself, and I think that he experiences this infrequent ritual entirely afresh every time.

Perhaps this deep thought occurred to me because I had just finished reading a fascinating article in this month's National Geographic about memory. The well-written story bounced between analyses of the neurophysiologic basis of memory and the captivating stories of two real persons with extraordinary memory disorders. One woman, referred to as AJ, has the most perfect, photographic memory ever tested; she remembers, quite literally, almost everything that has ever happened to her. But to her, this is a tormenting phenomenon, as if the past is continually in the forefront of her mind, not allowing her to escape her ever-present regrets, mistakes and embarrasments.

The other person, a man known as EP, had the neuro pathways in his brain eroded by an bizarre infection, and now has absolutely no memory beyond about ten seconds. Imagine every ten seconds awakening entirely anew to the whole world, with no memory or insight into where you were or who you are . . . and not even the slightest awareness that this complete naivete was, in fact, abnormal. But EP, in contrast, is not tormented in the least. He appears quite happy, care-free, an unwitting Zen Meister living unencumbered by the past, unaware of any future, and entirely in the now.

These extremes of memory highlight the miraculous nature of that organ where we all live out our lives: the brain. In medical school, I remember a fellow student asking our neuroanatomy professor a "why" question about the brain. His response went something like this: "I cannot answer any 'why' questions about the brain. In this course, I will teach you the what, where and how of the brain. But for the answers to the why questions, you'll need to speak with a theologian or a philosopher. Because, frankly, I don't know why this miracle exists."

Three pounds of flesh. Three trillion synaptic connections. The home of genius and madness, of symphonies and psychosis, a computer, a soul, a muse, a miracle. The most powerful tool in all of creation.

I'm talking, of course, about Foxy's brain.