by Akim Reinhardt
I was born before language. Only waterfalls and wind and tumbling rocks.
Nothing needed to be said if you only knew how to listen.
I still remember my grandparents phone number. 828-3973. They, on the other side of the Bronx, had the same area code as us, as the whole city: 212. No need to add it. Seven digits were plenty.
Placing my finger in our rotary phone’s circular template led to a swirling dance when dialing their number. Long, short, long short, long, long, short. Our own number was a marathon for whoever dared to spin it. 2 sixes, 3 sevens, an eight, and a nine.
My grandmother was the talkative one. A natural polyglot who got spit out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and eventually into the Lower Eastside before she married my grandfather and he took her up to the South Bronx. Hungarian from her family, Yiddish from being a European Jew, Romanian from the post-WWI schools, and English in the new country. She was completely fluent in her fourth language, with some slight quirks. “Do you have what to drink?”
My grandfather never spoke another word of Polish after he and his family got chased out, and just in time. Despite coming over as a teen, his English was forever deeply accented and a little broken. Yiddish was his main language, and as a result, my mother’s first. She learned English on the playground. I loved my grandfather deeply, but talking to him on the phone was awkward. He would ask rote questions, mostly the same ones each time. I would offer quiet, curt responses. We were much better in person, where he taught me how to play chess and read the stock page.
My best friend during elementary school lived in the next building. Our phone time was minimal. Why bother when we could just meet in the playground, or one of us could hop over to the other’s apartment on a bad weather day. You home? Okay, I’m coming over.
By high school, some of my friends were a little further flung, a neighborhood away. But by then we were building our masculinities. Our fathers and popular culture made it clear that yakking on the phone was for girls. Don’t be a chatty Cathy. Or a yenta, in my grandparents’ lingo. Read more »