10 The Telephone10 The Telephone.doc

10．The TelephoneWhen I was growing up in Magdaluna, a small Lebanese village in the terraced, rocky mountains east of Sidon, time didnt mean much to anybody, except maybe to those who were dying. In those days, there was no real need for a calendar or a watch to keep track of the hours, days, months, and years. We knew what to do and when to do it, just as the Iraqi geese knew when to fly north, driven by the hot wind that blew in from the desert. The only timepiece we had need of then was the sun. It rose and set, and the seasons rolled by and we sowed seed and harvested and ate and played and married our cousins and had babies who got whooping cough(百日咳) and chickenpox(水痘)—and those children who survived grew up and married their cousins and had babies who got whooping cough and chickenpox. We lived and loved and toiled and died without ever needing to know what year it was, or even the time of day.It wasnt that we had no system for keeping track of time and of the important events in our lives. But ours was a natural or, rather, a divine calendar, because it was framed by acts of God: earthquakes and droughts and floods and locusts and pestilences. Simple as our calendar was, it worked just fine for us.Take, for example, the birth date of Teta Im Khalil, the oldest woman in Magdaluna and all the surrounding villages. When I asked Grandma, How old is Teta Im Khalil?Grandma had to think for a moment; then she said, Ive been told that Teta was born shortly after the big snow that caused the roof on the mayors house to cave in.And when was that? I asked.Oh, about the time we had the big earthquake that cracked the wall in the east room.Well, that was enough for me. You couldnt be more accurate than that, now, could you?And thats the way it was in your little village for as far back as anybody could remember. One of the most unusual of the dates was when a whirlwind struck during which fish and oranges fell from the sky. Incredible as it may sound, the