The 4:42am Phone Call

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The 4:42am Phone Call

I was woken at 4:42am last Tuesday by a phone that was not ringing.

That is not poetic. It is just what happened.

I woke in the dark absolutely certain the phone had gone, then waited for it to go again so I could be properly annoyed. The house was silent. It had been silent the whole time.

That is one of the things retirement does not put on the leaflet. You leave the work, but the body keeps answering the old bells.

For most of my working life, being needed arrived without warning. The call at some ungodly hour because something had gone wrong somewhere, or was going to go wrong unless someone made a decision quickly. I complained about those calls for years.

I do not miss them.

I would take one tomorrow.

Both of those things are true.

What I miss is not the trouble. It is the summons. The small daily evidence that someone still thought of me when something needed sorting.

Retirement is full of this sort of double truth. You are relieved the pressure has gone, and then you notice that some of the pressure was also proof. You enjoy the quiet, and then the quiet answers back.

Nobody has done anything wrong. The world simply found other numbers.

That is the grief of it. Small, undramatic, difficult to photograph.

The full piece is on Substack:

https://theoldgreythinker.substack.com/p/the-442am-phone-call

This piece began on The Old Grey Thinker.

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