A rare thing happened over Labor Day weekend. After a 9-hour drive, all five people in my immediate family went to the same movie at the same time. Once your kids grow up and move away, you realize how much you miss the ordinary stuff — the chance to sit in a theatre together, share popcorn, and talk about the movie on the drive home. We used to do it all the time, but now it’s a rare treat since we live in different cities and states.
The movie is titled “The End of Oak Street,” so please stop reading now if you’re planning to see it and don’t want to know too much before you do.
Still with me? Okay, the movie is set in 1982 and is packed with suspense, time travel, special effects and some seriously scary scenes with prehistoric creatures.
For about 97 percent of the movie, aggressive dinosaurs flatten cars, demolish homes, and eat a whole bunch of extremely surprised neighbors on Oak Street. As if the dinosaurs weren’t scary enough, there’s also an enormous pale gray snake — measuring over 40 feet long and weighing more than a ton — that silently slithers into homes where it opens its giant mouth to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth. (I immediately covered my eyes and told Tom to tell me when it was safe to look.)
But thankfully, in the last few moments of the movie, a time-travel wormhole appears, and the mom, her two kids, and their brave dog jump into it. They were instantly transported back to a point in time about 20 to 30 minutes before the catastrophe struck. Although the wormhole took them to a safe spot across town, they knew disaster would soon engulf their neighborhood and everyone in it. So, the mom sprints into a nearby phone booth (remember those?) to call her husband, neighbors and friends, begging them to drive away as fast as possible.
On our way home from the movie, our 19-year-old daughter didn’t talk about the incredible special effects, the lifelike dinosaurs, or the nightmarish snake. Instead, she said, “That’s amazing how the mom had all those phone numbers memorized!”
Oh, my sweet Generation Z child. The same parents who bought you that Olympic-size bucket of movie popcorn also grew up in the prehistoric 1980s — when everyone knew numbers by heart simply because we had to.
With no pocket-sized smartphone to remember things for us, we called the same places over and over until the numbers stuck. To prove it, I rattled off my old home phone number, and Tom recited his.
Then Kate asked how many numbers I’d memorized in the 80s, and I realized the list was pretty long. I knew my three best friends’ home phone numbers, my mom’s work number, and the number for our local Pizza Hut delivery line. I also knew the number for my town’s tiny movie theatre, which had a recorded message listing the two movies playing that week. And everyone in town knew how to call the local bank’s “Time and Temperature” line, which was a recorded voice saying the exact time and temperature at any given moment.
I stopped the explanation at that point because all three adult kids were looking at me like I was older than the T-Rex we’d just seen on screen.
A few days later, I wondered if I might be too reliant on my smartphone’s saved contact info. What if artificial intelligence goes rogue and hacks into smartphones — wiping out all stored contact information? We’d be in real trouble because there’s no dusty phone book to serve as a backup like there was in the 80s.
So, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to memorize my immediate family’s phone numbers. It’s harder than I thought because I’m still pressing a name on a screen instead of dialing digit by digit.
After a few days of failed memorization, I put each phone number to the tune of a familiar song. One kid’s number is now locked in because I sing the numbers like they’re the words to “Jingle Bells.” I’ve also rewritten the lyrics to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Ridiculous? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
One of these days, if there’s a prehistoric, one-ton snake on the loose or an AI-triggered emergency, these kids will be glad I’ve still got their numbers.
Gwen Rockwood is a syndicated freelance columnist. Email her at gwenrockwood5@gmail.com. Her books are available on Amazon.