Some Change

This edition has a companion song, “Some Change,” written from the essay. The link is at the end of the piece. Press play, then read.

The plane out of Santa Barbara was twenty minutes late, which meant the connection in Denver was already tight before we landed. My hip has me on a cane these days, which earns us early boarding and costs us speed everywhere else, and the terminal was the most crowded I’d seen in years, everyone walking fast in different directions at the same time. Stopping for any reason felt like an indulgence I couldn’t afford. I stopped anyway. There was a voice, the internal kind that doesn’t explain itself, and it said stop, take the picture, you’ll figure it out. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I just knew I needed it.

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The wall

What I was looking at was a sign, dark brown lacquer, gold letters raised enough to read in braille underneath: Courtesy Phone. Above it, a No Smoking placard. Below it, an actual phone, the kind that used to hang in every kitchen in America, cream-colored, the handset heavy in a way plastic doesn’t feel anymore, a cord that coiled down toward the floor like it had given up trying to reach anyone. Around it, an Exit sign, a fire pull box, a keypad with a strip of red tape across the top. Emergency equipment on every side. And in the middle, one plaque that wasn’t emergency anything. It said courtesy.

Kymberlee was next to me. Nobody else was looking at that wall. A phone nobody was going to use, promising something nobody rushing past had time for.

The confession

I took the picture instead of picking up the phone, which is its own kind of confession. Whatever that phone offered, I didn’t take it. I wanted proof that it existed more than I wanted the thing itself.

We made the Pittsburgh flight with nothing to spare, and the moment I sat down I started writing. I don’t always do that. I’m always watching for the moment in a week that intrigued me, that’s the job I’ve given myself, but it’s rare that one grabs me hard enough that the seatbelt sign is still on and I’m already typing. This one did, and I think it’s because of the six weeks I’d just spent building a website for a friend, a poet-philosopher who has spent forty years writing about the space between what people say and what they mean. Working inside somebody’s language for that long changes how you walk through a day. You start seeing signs, literally and otherwise. So when I saw this one, the only person I sent it to was him.

His name is Noah benShea. Author of the Jacob the Baker books, the ones that ended up on Starbucks cups and hospital meal trays, translated into languages he doesn’t speak. I’d been living inside his sentences for a month and a half, and the picture went to him before I’d walked away from the wall.

Do you have change

He wrote back before we boarded. First he said the whole thing was a kind of prayer, that you’d have to get on your knees just to make a phone like that answer. Then, in the next breath: I love this. Do you need some change to make the call on that phone, because there’s another anomaly here. It’s some old phone. Courtesy, does anybody even know what that word means anymore. And if you had to use change, do you have change. He thought the whole thing was hilarious. He was right. Underneath the joke was the actual question, the one he’s spent a career asking without ever making it sound like a question. When was the last time you had change for anything.

The free call

Somewhere over the Rockies I worked out what the sign probably meant. A courtesy phone is a free call. It’s a courtesy from a day when a call cost money, a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a day before everyone carried a thousand-dollar phone in their pocket. The airport was saying: here, this one’s on us. Which only deepens the anomaly. It’s not for staff, staff have radios. It’s for a traveler, a stranger, someone who needed to reach somebody and didn’t have the coin. Somebody once looked at a terminal full of strangers and decided the building itself should be kind to them, and wired a wall to prove it.

The fire pull is for an emergency. The exit sign is for getting out. The keypad is for getting in. Every other thing on that wall assumes something has gone wrong or needs protecting. Courtesy assumes nothing’s wrong. It just sits there, running on faith, the kind Noah named, where you get on your knees and hope whoever’s on the other end decides to pick up.

Still on the wall

Nobody uses it anymore, obviously. But somebody kept the plaque up, kept the phone wired, kept the sign polished enough to catch a wandering eye at a gate nobody remembers the number of. That’s the part I keep turning over. Not the phone. The fact that it’s still on the wall, in a building otherwise engineered to keep your eyes moving forward, rush, rush, gate change, boarding group, no time to read anything that doesn’t apply to you.

I’ve been writing this since the wheels left Denver and I still can’t answer the simplest version of the question. If I’d picked it up, and it worked, and someone answered, who would I have called, and what would I have said. I had a cane in one hand and a phone worth a thousand courtesy calls in the other, and no change on me at all.

Listen to “Some Change” on Suno