I Don't Got Your Number And I Know You Don't Got Mine

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​I DON'T GOT YOUR NUMBER AND I KNOW YOU DON'T GOT MINE

     These days I often wake up in the morning or sometimes the middle of the night with my heart pounding from a bad dream. COVID dreams, I've heard these awful nocturnal apparitions called, and apparently a lot of us have been getting them over the past year. Manifestations of our repressed anxiety over the epidemic, they say.
        Most of my COVID dreams have been pretty bizarre and farfetched, but then there was the one I woke up from yesterday morning.  What made this particular mind movie so frightening wasn't that it was more bizarre than usual - on the bizarre scale it ranked only medium - but that the really scary part was not all that farfetched.
      I dreamed I was running through a crowded, surrealistic-looking airport, maybe like the one in Madrid,

...or Chicago,

...trying to escape someone or something that was chasing me. I made it out the gate to the runway and was tearing across the tarmac, desperate to make it up the steps and into the plane before the door closed. There were people in the door of the plane anxiously calling and waving for me to hurry. I made it inside the plane a second before the door closed. I was sitting, breathless and disheveled, next to a kind, grandmotherly woman who tried to calm me and assure me that I was safe now. The plane was headed to Chicago where I could call  my daughter who lives there to come and fetch me.
​       Then it hit me! I didn't have my cell phone! I'd dropped it while I was being chased through the airport! The grandmotherly woman told me not to worry, that I could borrow someone else's cell phone. Except...I didn't know my daughter's number! I didn't know anyone's number! The numbers of everyone I knew were stored not in my brain but in my cell phone! Without my own cell phone I couldn't call anyone!
        That's when I woke up, as breathless and sweaty as if I'd actually just been running for my life through an airport. But this time my dream-terror didn't dissipate as usual within a few moments of waking up, because it took me only a few moments to realize: OMG! If I were to arrive in Chicago without my cell phone I couldn't, in fact, call my daughter! 
        I sat up in bed and scrolled through my brain in search of the numbers I could call if I lost my cell phone. I came up with three: My husband's number and the numbers of two of my four children. Not the numbers of my other two children. Not my sister's or any of my other relative's. No number of a friend to call in a pinch.
      This got me to wondering: How many phone numbers do most of us have memorized? How much of a pickle would most of us be in if we were stranded somewhere without our cell phones?
         I then did a survey that included my spouse, my sister, my kids and their mates and a couple of their friends. How many numbers besides your own do you know? At the low end of the respondents was my hubby and one of my sons-in-law who had memorized one each, that of their spouses. A friend of one of my daughters shared that she knew three numbers, two of which she would never under any circumstances call. At the top end was my son's girlfriend, who had twelve numbers memorized. The others had anywhere from four to ten numbers they could call, mostly the numbers of their partners, their parents, a couple of friends or siblings, and/or their work numbers.
       ​  However they all knew 867-5309, from the catchy Tommy Tuntone pop song "867-5309/Jenny" about a guy who's in love with the voice at the end of a number that he discovered written on a wall.    

    As for me, I believe my nightmare was a wake-up call. My new resolution is to learn all the numbers I need to know without relying on my cell phone's brain. 
       Maybe I should try putting them to music?