Sometimes, when I am home alone, the red phone rings downstairs. It's a rotary phone from eBay. I bid $63.13 for it two years ago because we needed a land line for our alarm system, and so why not get an old rotary phone, because how cool are we, with our disposable income and throwback tastes?

The phone's bell is deadened by decades of wear, so the ringing sounds muffled and far away, like it's coming from my late-'80s childhood. I am thinking about the red phone today as the world jibber-jabbers about the 40th anniversary of the first cellphone call.

(READ the article by Dan Zak in the Washington Post)