Who you gonna call? How ’bout me?

by Deana Velandra

Calling people out of the blue has always been my thing. I’ve missed the late 90s and early 2000s when you could just call people on their landline. Well, at that time, it was a landline. Remember landlines?

You could call people and hope they would pick up, and you didn’t have to be anxious that you were making them anxious. And you didn’t have to wonder if they would answer and ask, “What’s wrong?”

You could just call. And if they didn’t answer, you would leave them a voicemail. And you would give them your phone number, unless, of course, it was your best friend or your grandma because your best friend and your grandma knew your phone number by heart. And you knew theirs, and for everyone else’s, you would look in the White Pages phone book or the school directory that got mailed home once a year.

Somehow we collectively grew out of this, and I don’t know if it was because of texting, or if it was because of Facebook, or if it was because of generalized anxiety, or if it was because of people being introverts all along pretending they were extroverts and deciding to give that up around 2008 or so. But people don’t do this anymore, except for me.

I won’t give it up.

So just know, if you ever give me your phone number, there’s a decent chance I’m going to call you. I don’t want you to be scared. I want you to pick up even though I probably don’t have anything in particular to tell you. And it seems to me that these days, people are falling into the thing that I’ve always done–that I’ve never forgotten or gotten too cool for—the thing I have been regularly lonely enough to do almost whenever I’ve wanted to over the past decade.

So, I’m just saying, all I’ve ever been saying is if you ever really, really wanted to talk to me, it’s just like my mom said in the late 90s and early 2000s and even still today–my phone rings as well as it dials.

Deana Velandra is administrative assistant for Women of the ELCA. She graduated from Hope College in Holland, Michigan, with a degree in both Theatre Performance and Women’s and Gender Studies. Deana is a company member at Cornservatory, a popular sketch comedy venue in Ravenswood, where fans are known as corn cobs. If you prefer writing letters over chatting, check out Women of the ELCA’s letter-writing campaign, Dear Friend in Christ.