Carson Reed

Carson reports: Carson Reed is a retired journalist who now only writes when he feels like. He can be reached at Lodo1@aol.com

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You been waiting for me to call and I been waiting for you to call and nobody

calls and we just wait.

We are signal-free. Our digital phones make zero ones and zero zeros. We are

flush with weekday minutes. Our phone bills come every-other month.

All the germs on our telephone mouthpieces have died of neglect.

Your Nokia has a cricket in it. My Cricket has a spider.

Our telephone notepads have no notes. Our Sticky Notes are blank blue blocks.

The outsides of our refrigerators are empty.

We are sine-qua-non-talkers. We are liberators who have freed the airwaves of

our speech. People who like to talk to each other should call us and thank

us. And they would, too, if our numbers were listed.

We are verbally chaste. We are phone abstinant. We just say no to talking.

It isn't always easy. Sometimes I have dreams of talking to you and in the

morning all the things I wanted to say stain my pillow. Sometimes (blush) I

lock myself in the bathroom and talk myself silly.

People put their ears to my ear so they can hear the ocean. People drop

pennies in your ear and make a wish.

I'm not sure what happened. I think we must have been taking turns not

calling each other and somebody took two turns and messed things up. Now,

it's been so long we've both forgotten whose turn it is to not call. We both

think it's our turn!

Really it's all so silly I was going to call but then I got to thinking that

I been thinking about this all wrong. We may be standing at the edge of an

achievement. What is the world record for continuous tandem not talking

anyway? We must be close.

Carson Reed