Busy?

My genome is clearly wonky in spots, with entire nitrogen base pair strings apparently set aside for the ability to enjoy fast food or find Garfield comic strips funny. Despite these glaring deficits, my biological imperative is strong, extending beyond even the desire for direct procreation. In short, I relish the prospect of aging, if only because I think I would make a spectacularly grouchy old man.

I want to be around long into the future, telling indignant stories of a younger, more primitive world. And how, sometimes, just sometimes, an advanced set of privileges creates a cabal of unforeseen obligation. For example, I want to live precisely long enough to assure that my great-grandkids know what a busy signal is. In this world of multiple lines, unlimited texts, and voice mail on demand, you might think I should say, “What a busy signal was.” Up until two days ago, I would have likely agreed.

This week, one of my best friends is in town visiting his parents. When I dialed his childhood home, I received, like a voice from the distant past, that gratingly insistent beep of audible rejection. It was a real, honest-to-goodness busy signal! The sound was so abjectly anachronistic, so jarringly foreign that I stared at my phone and, in that moment, felt its true power.

I was holding in my sweaty paw a piece of metal and plastic able to wirelessly transmit my mundane, animalistic thoughts over thousands of miles in real time. I’m not ashamed to say the enormity fairly slapped me upside the head. I mean, step back in time a few hundred years and they’d be burning me at the stake as a witch for even suggesting such a device. Then, just as quickly, I found myself contemplating the busy signal itself.

I searched my brain wildly, looking for that day in the Eighties when my father announced that the big, canary yellow phone in the kitchen - the one with the tangled noose of cord and large, grimy buttons you actually had to push - would now have this thing named, “call waiting.” Never again would we miss a phone call. Even my eight year-old self found this supposition to be nakedly ironic. We all knew we were struggling financially, dodging hungry creditors day and night.

Our family hid in plain sight, mostly by not answering the phone at all. If the dogged seeker was too persistent, we’d simply leave it off the hook. A busy signal was thus annoying, but familiar and even oddly comforting. Through its careful cacophony, you could legitimately ignore the world. To be on the receiving end of this particular sound was to have the world remind you that it also had other things to do. Not everything was about you and your immediate desires. While I usually abhor the very act of talking on the phone, I can’t recall the last time that I thought of myself as legitimately “too busy” to do so.

This realization saddened me in a way. I found myself envying my friend and his parents’ self-professed, “hippies barely on the grid” sensibility at work on the other end of the line. How lucky for them that they should be too busy for my stupid, little dinner party RSVP. What if they were getting the news that Cousin X is having a baby and Uncle Y isn’t happy? Or, maybe a neighbor needs them to feed the cats while they’re off to Aunt Z’s funeral. It was also heartening to consider that they were too busy to hear that I was bringing potato salad or any part of the litany of horribly inane prattle I might likely utter.

Good for them, I thought. Be too busy. I wish I were. Rather, I wish I could realize more regularly that I already am. I should be busy hugging my kid, or reading a book, or going out into actual sunshine. I shouldn’t answer my phone ever again until I have written to my grandfather in response to his weekly newspaper clippings decrying the pitiful state of the Mets this year. I am busy. I have so many things to do, right at this very second, that I shouldn’t even be writing this silly missive meant to mildly entertain people I’ll probably never meet. I should be busy living, not just talking about it.

Sad, mad, or totally ecstatic, we should all be out there doing it. At the very least, I should be working my gut off at the gym, if only for the express purpose of living long enough to tell my grandkids that there was once a world where people had a specific and terribly annoying sound used to indicate that they were too busy to listen to you whenever you selfishly pleased. “Kids, there used to be this weird thing called a busy signal,” and maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.