my "home phone" is in the car

There's a moment in the movie "Meet Me In St. Louis" when the elder sister of the character played by teenaged Judy Garland interrupts the whole family's turn-of-the-century dinner when she receives a Long Distance Phone Call from the man she hopes is about to propose to her. She leaps up from the table and dashes into the dark paneled hallway in a flurry of ruffles to receive that call, and everyone is mightily impressed that she's getting a Long Distance Phone Call. This must be Serious.

Fast-forward roughly 104 years, and you get me, yakking on my cell phone via its little hook-over-the-ear speaker and microphone doohickey* while sitting in traffic on northbound 405. My cell is my "home phone" but I use it in the car a lot more than I do at home, and nearly 100% of my calls on it are Long Distance. But few of them are Serious.

Because the highway tends to be so clogged at "rush hours" (truly, really, the opposite of rushing) my commutes are my best phone chatting times. Yesterday morning I talked to my mom during the morning commute. This morning, I caught up with my Atlanta-based friend S* while I drove to work. This afternoon, my sister C* called me during her commute home from work. She's done that a couple of times recently and I always enjoy it. Her commute time hits in midafternoon here, when my energy is starting to flag. Hearing from C* with nephew C* occasionally putting in his two cents' worth from his carseat in the back, gives a lift to my day. Sometimes in the evening, as I creep back down the 405, I'll call a friend in the Central time zone (thus erring on the side of caution re late-night phone calls).

Footnote to the * above: someone I worked with recently used the memorable term "hoochamagooch" to mean "doohickey, thingamabob, widget whose name I don't know." I chortled quietly to myself and stifled the urge to ask whether "hoochamagooch" is a technical term. But I may have to incorporate it into my already overstuffed vocabulary.