Yesterday evening, for no reason in particular, I suddenly determined that I would go through all 87 messages on our answering machine and delete the bulk of them. It drives M crazy when I tell him to leave the messages alone, or when I bitch him out for deleting one without authorization. So, yesterday when he arrived home from work and found me hunched over the machine, ("MESSAGE SKIPPED, MESSAGE 16....) he rejoiced. But his joy turned to puzzlement when he discovered that I wasn't really deleting them all. A message from my sister came on ("Heeeey L!...it's me, S...") and I skipped it. Same with a message from my mother, one from my friend S, my friend K, my brother D, a terse, quick one from M imploring me to "pick up the phone!" and a silly message from C begging me to "call back soon! -I need you to tell me to get rid of some of these shoes- because I am never going to wear them but for some reason I cannot toss them!" All in all, I only kept about 10 out of 87, which I thought was a pretty conservative save rate, but M wondered aloud what was going on.
The truth is (and I spilled it somewhat sheepishly) I don't delete voice messages from my loved ones because I am afraid that if they die I will never be able to hear their voices again. If something were to happen to C or to my mom or my sister or K, I should be awfully glad that I saved those small and frivolous verbal missives. Insignificant though they be ("Ok -I'm coming over! -I hope you're there!"), these messages will return them to the waking world for just a moment - and I can imagine that K really might come over and that C is truly waiting for me to return her call. I want to be able to hear my mom signing off, "OK -well, I hope you know I love you!" one more time after it is too late to say it back.
"Seriously?" M asked, somewhat incredulous. "That's weird. That's kind of morbid and creepy and weeeird."
Maybe it's weird. I told my friend B about my freakish tendency and she said she does the same thing. But B is bonafide crazy, so maybe M is right. To add a smidgen of superstition to the mix, I should note that I sometimes worry that if I do delete a message on accident, the person who left it will almost certainly die, leaving me with nothing. Now that's crazy.
2 comments:
My mom saved her father's message singing happy birthday to her in September. He died the following summer. She put the message on tape and gave it to my grandma - a very appreciated gift. I don't think what you are doing is strange at all. Though these days, if you have video of the person, it make provide the same effect, only not as personal (directed at you) as a voicemail.
Hmm. Well, yeah, a little on the crazy side, I guess. But kind of sweet, too. I don't see why you shouldn't indulge this particular craziness, but I wonder if you could lift them from the phone and store them somewhere more convenient? I like to use phone messages as a sort of urgent to do list, so I can sympathize with being grumpy about having a lot of ones saved that no one needs to do anything about :-)
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