Anytime Minutes

Lisa makes sure that her cell phone plan has plenty of anytime minutes because, she told me, most of the time she is unhappy with the people of the present.

Last Tuesday she thought it would be a good idea to call her grandmother's Great Aunt Ida, who lived on a farm in 1863. Lisa had first heard about Aunt Ida in bedtime stories and she showed such fascination with the ancestor that she was presented with Ida’s diary on the eve of her sixteenth birthday. Aunt Ida had been the first woman elected to city council in the state of Wyoming. Even though women could not vote in 1863, there was no law prohibiting them from running for office, and also no law prohibiting women from refusing to sleep with their husbands if they did not vote for Mrs. Ida Mae Hopkins. Unfortunately the telephone was not invented until 1873 and poor Aunt Ida had to spend a week in bed because of the horrible ringing in her ears. Lisa stopped calling when she read about this in the diary.

Over the weekend she called her great grand daughter's best friend. Her name will be Lupita and, in the year 2102, she will be 12 years old. Lisa, not wanting Lupita to know she was from the past, pretended to be doing a survey about drug use in twenty-second century adolescents. It sounded like Lisa's great granddaughter will already be smoking a half a pack a day by the time she is thirteen. This worried Lisa for most of the afternoon but at dinner she decided that if cigarettes are still around one hundred years in the future then they must have found a cure for cancer.

Last night Lisa called the Lisa she had been when she was in high school. The phone contract had strict warnings against calling one's past, but Lisa knew that the sixteen-year-old Lisa, who aspired to be a state representative, would never recognize the soap-opera-addicted, furniture-polishing, wife of a youth-pastor-who-did-not-believe-in-birth-control and consequently mother of six, she would become. Old Lisa did not talk to young Lisa very long. Not wanting to risk changing history she tried the drug survey act again, and was surprised to discover that she had been a terrible liar.

This morning, Lisa called me. I am actually a caveman named Pelto. A few years before I wrote this, I found a rock that was making a ringing noise. A noise I would later learn was a ringtone of "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" from the musical Showboat. I picked up the rock and when I put it up to my ears I heard someone speaking a language that I would also later learn was English. I know that may be hard to believe, but I have a lot of spare time as my wife does most of the hunting. Anyways, I first started talking to Lisa a few weeks back. She called me by accident, (This happens a lot--my phone number is 3.) but we hit it off. She calls me now almost every day, tells me about her life, and keeps me up to date on all of my favorite soap operas. Yesterday she told me about a doctor on a talk show who stressed the importance of keeping a journal and I thought I'd try it. This is my first journal entry. Come to think of it, it's probably the first journal entry. I promise to write in it every day.