Cell Phone Follies

My father is 89 years old and in remarkably good health. Although he no longer farms and a tenant manages the property, he still can be found with a hoe, or a rake, or pruning shears taking care of some little details the tenant’s employees might miss.

His major job is to run the irrigation system. He consults with the farm manager about the watering schedule, then starts and stops pumps at times dictated by PGE’s Time of Use Rate Schedule. He uses a 4 wheeled ATV to check for broken sprinklers before starting the pump, and once the water is on he drives around making sure none of the sprinklers are plugged and all of them are turning.

He was doing this on Thursday morning. After checking all the sprinklers and getting his pants wet in the process, he went home to change clothes and have lunch. Then he remembered he needed to retrieve his cell phone, but when he checked his pants pockets it was gone.

The last time he knew for certain that he had it was just after he started the pump and just before he set out on his inspection rounds of the 18 acres being irrigated. That narrows the search zone down to 7,840,080 square feet.

He called me for assistance. As is usual on Thursdays I was doing the Club ride out of Wallace, but his call came through just as I was finishing. His health is excellent but his hearing is awful when he doesn’t use hearing aids. So the plan was for him to use my mom’s cell phone to call his cell number over and over, while I walked up and down the walnut rows listening for the stock Verizon ringtone while getting wet from the sprinklers.

Who among us has not done the same thing? I’ve called my own cell number using our land line to try to locate my smart phone. And yes, we still have a land line. I’m not sure why except that it comes in handy to locate lost cell phones. But usually the search zone is limited to inside the house or garage or our yard. Not the aforementioned 7,840,080 square feet!

My dad’s phone is a very old and primitive flip phone model. He doesn’t use it for anything except actual phone calls, so if you get his number forget about texting him. The financial loss would be minimal but the nuisance factor would be considerable: I’m sure learning how to deal with a new phone would not be my dad’s favorite way to pass time.

So up and down the rows I walked, getting wet and listening carefully and privately laughing at the futility of the effort. The phone was undoubtedly wet and probably not working. If it was, how many rings would it take to drain the battery? But I gave it my best shot. I’m not sure a 2 or 3 mile hike is the best recovery from a spirited bike ride chasing Marlin on South Comanche Parkway, but I wasn’t complaining and the day was warm and the cool water on my legs felt nice.

I finished 15 of the acres with no result, but as I approached the last 3 acres my dad came up to me and made the ‘broken chicken wing’ gesture. If you do not have Linden Italian farmer roots you may not know what this is. When something is exasperating, you raise an arm like you are taking an oath, but you turn the wrist down and push the elbow out while muttering something unintelligible that sounds like ‘aayeeyah’. If things are really beyond the pale, you might see the ‘double chicken wing’, which is the same gesture using both arms simultaneously. The ‘double chicken wing’ is reserved for moments of supreme frustration at the foolishness of oneself or of others. I employ it regularly when Newsom and/or Fauci are pontificating and nagging.

It turned out that the missing cell phone had slipped out of his pants pocket and into a crevasse in the mud room closet where my dad keeps his dry clothes. My mom happened by and heard the phone and answered it. So my dad did the chicken wing because he didn’t look enough in the most likely place before sending his oldest son on a walk through the orchard.

I didn’t mind. I’m lucky my parents are still healthy and don’t need much help, so when they do ask for something I hop to it. Even if I risk a broken chicken wing directed at some folly of mine.