Someday we’ll talk by wireless. Indeed it will be fine! But in the meantime don’t you think you might drop me a line?” So reads a Santa Fe postcard, circa 1900. By the time we’d moved to Santa Fe, talking by wireless was commonplace, but in our early days here, it was accomplished via that odd holdover from an earlier era: the party line. The party line had nothing to do with “parties,” although when the two-long-one-short ring of someone else’s phone blasted forth in the middle of the night, one did suspect that somewhere a soirée was in full swing.

Five parties shared our line, which is a whole lot of telephone action. Not only was the phone forever singing out in five different patterns, there was also the wait for the line to be free, as well as the inevitable series of impatient clicks as our party mates urged us to wind up our calls.

Fortunately, we didn’t know many folks to call back then, and we certainly couldn’t afford to call long distance. Nevertheless, we waited for what felt like eons to move up the list to acquire our very own telephone line. It seemed there was a certain parsimony, as with liquor licenses, to the bestowal of such a privilege. Now, this all seems very quaint and odd, especially in view of the discarded cell phones piling up in the cupboard, victims of the next, more competitive wave of offers and deals.

In our kitchen hangs a very red, very old rotary phone, a throwback to the past. To slow time and regulate heartbeat and breath, there is nothing quite like the Zen quality of such an instrument. It takes the hurry out of life in a most peculiar way. Now that we are all connected—even those of us living in that land once so remote, New Mexico—and now that “someday” is here, yesterday has a definite appeal, particularly in Siren Song Red.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its remoteness, New Mexico was among the first in line for Mr. Bell’s fabulous invention. Las Vegas had service by the 1880s, followed by Albuquerque and, later, Santa Fe. By the time this outback achieved statehood in 1912, New Mexico was one of the few states that had a patched together long-distance service from coast to coast. A year later, the Montezuma Hotel on Water Street would boast “Electric Lights, Steam Heat, Hot & Cold Water, Telephone in Every Room.”

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