Rotary Dial Cell Phone / Sword in the Phone

We got my son a cell phone for Channukah. It's a nice one with a little keyboard for texting. He was appropriately grateful but explained that he'd have been happy with a phone without a screen. "Actually, I'd have been perfectly happy with a rotary dial cell phone." When I told my daughter this, she quipped that "That'd take a long time to text with a rotary dial." (The above image is what such a thing might look like. If I were better with Photoshop, I'd have loved to have Steampunked the phone a bit more.)

Perhaps he'd have been happy with one of those cell phones with a cord that attaches to the wall. Or one of those phones with beaks and wings.

For me, the archetype of the phone is still the classic rotary dial. However, I remember playing Pictionary with my wife's late grandfather. He was drawing something that we couldn't quite identify. It was one of those very old phones with the hand crank that had a cuplike receiver that you had to hold to your ear. That was his archetype of the phone. My children will have a very different visual image. And their children? A wireless cochlea implant?

When we visited Cape Canaveral when my kids were very little, I recall explaining to my son that the Saturn V rocket was one of those 'old fashioned spaceships' and being boggled that I could actually say such a thing--me, who remembers being called in from playing on the street of the little Irish village where I grew up to witness the moon landing on Michael Wallace's little black and white TV set. "This is important, boys," his mother said. "You'll remember this." And I did, though at the time, I didn't know that it was being filmed in Sudbury.