As long ago as 2008, an event happened in my life. I was still grieving for my late second wife Jane, who had died of sepsis in 2005, and suffering from relentless loneliness, the deep depression consuming me little by little. A long-lost friend appeared out of nowhere and we talked and talked, somewhat revitalizing me, a bit.
The first thing he did was to buy me a fiddle. He’d found out in our conversation that I no longer had one, so he decided to remedy that. I had not requested that he do that. I’m not made that way, but he did.
The next thing he did was to invite my older brother and me to his town house in Texas, in the Dallas area but not Dallas itself. He didn’t want me to be out away from home without a phone, so he asked me what kind of phone I’d like to have. The only one I knew of at the time was the Motorola Q. With Mobile Speak Smartphone from Code Factory, I’d pretty much have access to its screen and such. So he bought me that too, and there was a big discount for Mobile Speak, so he lucked out a bit I suppose.
I received the phone in plenty of time to learn its operation and stuff before we left for Texas. The flight, round trip of course was all booked and paid for by my friend.
Sadly, he broke off contact at some point after that, but through the years the phone served me well, traveling with me to Wales and then back to America when that marriage went south. It had another spate of use when my now-wife Eva came for a visit in 2014 and we prowled from north to south Louisiana. I made excellent use of the flat rate I had with AT&T. I had to make all kinds of calls and didn’t have to worry about metered charges anywhere in the states.
After that visit, and after the phone became to be used less and less, I still loyally kept it charged, kept the time set, even when I moved here to Germany and there was no longer a server for it to sync to.
This past Saturday night, we set our clocks back and I began that chore. I set my Victor Reader Stream back to standard time. I set my two watches, one Braille and one talking, back an hour. But when I attempted to set my Windows phone, it wouldn’t come on. Desperately, I plugged it in. I had to do that using an iPhone wall charger as its charger had long since given up the ghost, but, alas, it still didn’t come up.
So, the next day, with sadness in my heart, more sentiment coursing through my veins than I would have thought possible, I gathered up all the things that couldn’t be used any more, took out the sim, yeah, it was still in, even though it had no minutes on it, broke that in half and put all that in the trash. The only things I salvaged was the cord, for it can be used for other things, and I took out the micro SD card and put it away, maybe to use at some point, though it’s a small-capacity one, but still usable, so I couldn’t make myself throw that away.
So, goodbye to a faithful phone, even more faithful than my vanished friend, and may you serve in the afterlife, wait a minute, it doesn’t have a soul, smile. But anyhow, rest in peace, kind and faithful phone, as you did serve me so well!
P.S. I still have the fiddle. I tried to regain my lost abilities of playing but never quite got back the level of skill I had when I was so many years younger. A friend, one who hasn’t vanished, made the trip from America to Germany and brought it to me. He and his wife were going on a cruise over this way, so that’s how I’m in possession of the fiddle.