summer 1965 wishing for the invention of the cell phone

summer 1965 wishing for the invention of the cell phone

fiction
Edward w Pritchard

The three of us we inseparable the summer I was sent to Aunt Erma's cabin on Lake Milton to learn manner's and keep me out of the detention home in Akron. I was on a bad track with my life and my Mother couldn't control me so they sent me to be bored to death fishing, swimming, rowing a boat and sleeping till noon with my cousins Eddie and  Jack.

My uncle, Eddie and Jack's Father stayed at their big house in Cleveland during the week to attend to his law practice so only My aunt Erma was around. We three cousins had a lot of fun.

Eddie and Jack's family had a lot of money; the refrigerator was stocked, there was beer and cigarettes everywhere and at the beach club across the Lake girls our age fourteen to seventeen always had a new string bikini to show off in every week all Summer. Me and Eddie spent a lot of time at the beach with the girls but Jack had a girl friend back in Cleveland. Mostly Jack stuck around the cabin and talked and talked to his girl, Clara on the phone. She was a gorgeous looking girl, his age seventeen and his friends and others back in Cleveland tried to snake Jack with Clara while Jack was away. Jack used to wrap up the phone receiver in a towel as he talked to her for hours and hours so his ear wouldn't get sweaty in the heat there in the cabin or on the porch. Also me and Eddie used to razz Jack for being on the phone all the time, we called it being whipped then if you spent all your time chasing one girl even a spectacular one like Clara Mitchell so Jack sort of hid the phone by wrapping it in a towel.

One morning when I got up early to go to the beach with Eddie there was Jack laying on the floor talking to Clara with a towel around the phone stuck to his ear and I said something like someday someone should invent a miniature cordless go anywhere phone so a guy like Jack could still go to the beach with me and Eddie and at the same time talk on the phone to his best girl. Jack liked that; Jack and I fussed a lot but he was along with being my cousin, like an older brother to me and that Summer Jack straightened me out and it's because of Jack that I never went back to reform school again and my Mom was able to raise me herself until I went into the army two Summer's later.

I was in the army training in North Carolina when I heard Jack had been killed in Viet Nam in 1968.

 It's been 45 years since I heard Jack was shot in the neck in Viet Nam during the Tet offensive but I always wish that the cell phone had been invented back in 1966 so Jackie could have talked to his best girl while at the beach there at Lake Milton with me and Eddie and maybe Jack could have called me from the field in the Tet offensive one last time to say goodbye before he got shot in the neck and died from hemorrhage while in transit to a field hospital in Viet Nam back in 1968.