'Is this the party to whom I am speaking?' *

My son is 17. As with most of his contemporaries, his phone appears to be permanently attached to his body. He holds text conversations, often with up to five or six people simultaneously while keeping an eye on the NBA draft, reporting bits and pieces of news items that pop up, updating Facebook, following Twitter, playing a game, watching YouTube. He lives a lot of his life inside that phone.

(I have written about the world and the language of text, right here, if you're interested.)

I don't usually play the "when-I-was-your-age" game. I try to avoid anything that resembles old-fogey-ism. I did tell him about the telephone though.

In the house where I grew up, when you came in the front door, you were in the hall. If you bore right, you would go upstairs – the stairs were open to the hall but separated from the downstairs by a wall. If you went straight ahead, you were in the heart of the house, with the living room to the left and the kitchen straight ahead.

The door from the hall and the door into the kitchen both opened into the living room area (it wasn't really separate from the living room; it was an outcropping of the living room) and were pinned back against the wall by a small piece of furniture called a "telephone bench" – or, I've since learned, also called a "gossip bench."

Ours was green, vinyl-covered, with two shelves on one side and a seat that raised to allow for storage underneath.

This is one:

And here's another:

Neither one of these is really like ours but if you combine certain elements from each, it would be sort of like ours.

Inside the storage seat were old catalogues and magazines and, for some reason, this toy:

I have no idea why I remember this, or why those things were kept there. I have no memory of anyone ever playing with them although I can still remember exactly how it felt to squeeze them and see the ping pong ball fly out. And yes, you were supposed to catch it.

Finally, this is what the telephone looked like – with the exception of the coiled cord:

Our number was 456-12 – expressed as four five six ring twelve. When it was for us, it rang one long, two short. All our phone conversations – intimate ones with boyfriends, secretive ones with girlfriends – were held just steps away from where family members were reading the paper, listening to the radio, chatting among themselves. Sometimes, if I felt I really needed the privacy, I would haul the little gossip bench out, squeeze myself behind one of the doors and try to have a jacket or something to build a little tent over my head. The vacuum cleaner was behind there too.

When we had this kind of phone, it was a party line. It didn't seem any kind of inconvenience as it had always been this way and we became used to sharing the line with neighbours. It was another level of learning to speak somewhat guardedly – maybe leading to a reticence which is not so obvious in subsequent generations!

"Listening in" was not routine at our house but we knew houses where it was. We knew one woman who kept an oven mitt beside her phone to cover the receiver when she wanted to listen in to a conversation on her party line.

Do you remember this?

When one of my friends got one – the Princess Phone – for her bedroom, we were all a little jealous. I never did get a Princess Phone. (Later on, the teen generation that was after me but before cell-phones, often had not only a phone in their bedrooms but their own phone line. They were listed in the phone book under the family name as, "teenager's phone.")

Today, our landline supports our primary cordless phone downstairs, as well as a hands-free phone (with head-set) and a fax phone. There are phones in two of the bedrooms upstairs.

Among the three of us, we have an iPhone, a Blackberry and a simple little Samsung with a sliding full keyboard (mine). I got my phone after I was struck by how few public pay phones are left in the world. (My cell phone number begins 456 – the same four five six as the first phone I remember.)

I don't intend this to be nostalgic although telephones are occasionally more ubiquitous than I would wish. I still know people who don't carry phones everywhere they go and they survive. I often get annoyed at people who have loud phone conversations in public places. And I could happily get along without the endless telemarketing even though I have gone to the trouble of getting on the no-call lists. They don't work as well as I'd like.

The telephone has been used a great source of humour, however. From Shelley Berman to Bob Newhart to the great Lily Tomlin. . .

* Here's Ernestine, telephone operator, chatting with the incomparable Cher.