Paging Dr. Alisdair

I miss belt loops.

I know that sounds like a strange thing to miss, but as I sit here in the back of a drawer, surrounded by pairs of broken glasses, random loose batteries, and covered by a stack of manuals of some kind, I wish I could be hooked to a belt loop again. I’d even take being shoved in a pocket with twelve pens and a pack of gum over this, because at least then, I would get out in the light whenever someone would send me a message.

The only time I see light now is when He is looking for something in this drawer. Every once in a while, (hours? Days? Weeks? I don’t even know how time passes anymore), the manuals will move, and I’ll see him, rummaging here and there, usually for batteries. Never for me. After a few moments, the manuals go right back where they were, and the drawer shuts with a click.

Back in the day, I was the first thing he checked in the morning and the last thing he saw at night. He’d lay me on his nightstand with his glasses, right next to the old red phone, ready to jump the moment I sang to him. There were nights when the summons were almost constant, many more where the occasional message was sent, and those rare nights when I remained silent for the entire night. On those nights, I would watch him sleep, his dark, curly hair an absolute mess as he tossed in his sleep. He looked so young without his glasses, but the small streaks of grey at his temples betrayed his real age.

On those mornings, his eyes would fly open at the alarm, and the first thing he’d do was grab me. He’d panic, shoving his glasses haphazardly onto his face while pulling up my history to make sure he hadn’t missed an important summons in the middle of the night, surely imagining some nightmare situation where he was needed and not responding. When the menu revealed that no messages had been sent, he would grin from ear to ear, fixing his frames so they sat evenly across the bridge of his nose and running his hand through that mess of curls. I loved seeing him like that, and I loved knowing that I was the reason he smiled.

During the day, I was his constant companion. Before he left for the day, he’d slip me on the first belt loop on the right side of his pants, slipping his white coat on top of both of us, before leaving for the day. I sat on his hip while he saw our patients: the newly born, the teething, the weaning, all the way up through those encountering first days of school, cars, loves, jobs, and more. He’d keep lollipops in his pockets for those who cried and needed a bit of cheering up, and stickers lined on the walls for a job well done. The young ones loved the stickers, of course – cartoon characters and animals and cars – the older ones pretended not to care, and sometimes even complained about them, but they always took them. 

I didn’t often work during this time. The receptionist at the front wasn’t routing calls to me for him while he was “in clinic”. Instead, she would come find him, popping her gum, and let him know that there were calls for him. People called all the time in those days for advice, to ask questions, and to be reassured that their children were going to be fine.

In the afternoons, we would leave the cozy office and grab a coffee and a sandwich at the little shop at the bottom of our building, before jumping back in the car and driving to the hospital. He would set me in the cupholder, next to his coffee, while he drove, where he could reach me if I summoned him. In the beginning, there was always change in the cupholder, too, and when I sang, he would find a gas station to pull into, grabbing me and a few quarters to use the payphone in the parking lot. 

When we first got to the hospital, he’d still be in his white coat, and we would go see all the sick children in the hospital. Some were his patients, while others were patients of his colleagues. He’d see them all, bringing them lollipops and stickers stuffed into his coat pockets. Sometimes, the children were very sick, and we’d go down to the cold locker room. I’d sit on the bench while he changed out of his nice office clothes and into the baggy green scrubs that were folded in cubbies. When he wore scrubs, I sat in his back pocket. 

I didn’t get to see what went on while he wore scrubs, but if I summoned him, someone would take me out of his pocket and read me, and I’d catch glimpses of the big blue blankets, the masks, and the strange gowns and gloves everyone wore. The nurse would walk me to the phone on the wall and dial in my message and let the person on the other line know that Dr. Alisdair was in surgery, but he would return their message when he could. Then, she would write the number and message down on a piece of paper, fold it, stick it in my clip, and slip both the message and me back into his pocket. When he finished and changed back into his normal clothes, he would pluck the paper out of my clip and sit down to return calls. He always made time to return calls.

One day, he got a new helper to make our lives “easier”. It was about twice my size, with a square screen and number buttons like the phone in his bedroom. It had a green screen like mine, and made noise like I did when someone summoned me. It sat in a holster, clipped to the second loop on his pants. When I would summon him, instead of scrambling for a phone, he would use this new, portable one. No longer would he have to pull over on the side of the road and scrounge for change. It sat in the cupholder next to me, ready to work whenever he needed it to. It sat in his other scrub pocket when we were in the OR. It let him respond to people quicker, and gave him more time to see patients and spend with his sick children.

But then, it started summoning him, too.

The first time it did, he looked at it strangely. He picked it up and answered it, then checked me to see if I had summoned him first. I hadn’t. He sounded angry on the phone, told the person to page him first next time. Surely, the person had forgotten that I’m the one that needed to summon him. That was my job! But then, it happened again. Sometimes, it would ring while he was in clinic, startling a young child and making him lose his train of thought. Sometimes it would ring while he was trying to listen to rattly lungs or a gurgley belly. The day it rang three times while he was in surgery was the first time I ever saw him yell at someone on the phone. I thought for sure he was going to abandon that thing and we would go back to the way things were.

But slowly, he stopped getting angry about being summoned by this portable phone. Fewer people used me to summon him and allowed this thing to summon him, instead. My summons became less urgent, and sometimes they wouldn’t use me until after they called the phone two or even three times. He got to spend more nights without me singing to him, and he smiled less when he checked me in the morning. Instead, he would frown and pick up the other one, scrolling through it like he used to scroll through me.

The routine for this phone was more intense than mine. He used special cloths to clean it’s screen and had to plug it into the wall to charge it. He stopped cleaning my screen. He forgot to change my batteries sometimes, and once or twice he even pulled me out to find that my screen had gone dark and my voice silent, cursing under his breath as he scrambled to find another battery.

Then, he got rid of the portable phone. He slipped it into the junk drawer, and I could have wept for joy. He’d been so much happier with me, with my work, and the way things used to be. He’d learned, and we would be happy together the way we once were. When he pulled out the new box, with the smaller rectangle with no buttons, I was confused. What on earth was this thing? When he tapped the screen, buttons appeared and disappeared. An entire keyboard sometimes showed up. It had different sounds for calls, and even had a sound like mine that would display text on the screen.

Text. On the screen. That was my job.

I still sang to him, occasionally. But my songs were fewer and far between. No one was using me anymore. Instead, new songs came from this new rectangle. It could become a phone, or me, in an instant. He could even send messages back with it. I couldn’t do that if I tried; I only had a few buttons, and it took minutes to type a few letters with them. With this, he could send entire sentences in seconds.

The last day he held me, my battery had been dead for hours. My screen was dark, and a crack rand down the middle from where he’d dropped me. The ink on my buttons was long faded, and someone who had never used me would have to use trial and error to figure out what they did.

He was much older now, the glasses thicker, with more gray than black in his hair. His eyes were tired, wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and mouth betraying a lifetime of smiles and laughter, and the ones in between his brows of anger and frustration. There was no anger on his face when he looked at me, but instead…was that sadness? He slipped the junk drawer open and laid me inside, along with my spare battery, and closed the drawer slowly, the rectangle lighting up in his pocket as he did so, taunting me.

The drawer opens again, and small hands shuffle through the contents. I feel small fingers grab me, holding me up to the light. Light! I missed it so much! The girl who holds me is about the same age as the ones who grumbled about stickers but took them anyway. She has his dark, curly hair, and his eyes. “Grampa, is this a game?” she says, and I see him.   He ambles over, moving slower than I’ve ever seen him move. He still has a single black streak left in his silver-white hair, but the curls have all gone limp and he’s cut it short and neat. He looks at me, and smiles – the same smile he used to give me when I let him sleep through the night. 

“That’s my old pager,” he says, fondness in his voice. “It’s how people used to get ahold of me before cell phones.”