Copyright 2007 Lydia Hinshaw
CANAVERAL NATIONAL SEASHORE, FL -- We'd been away from the house for at least 90 minutes, in and out of the car a couple of times. We'd hiked half a mile down a rutted sand road and back, and then down a short but overgrown trail to the lagoon.
Suddenly I heard an expletive behind me, and when I turned around, Prince Charming was clutching his stomach. Specifically, he was clutching the spot on his belt where his cell phone usually resides. It wasn't there.
We have become cell phone folks in our old age. When we left for Alaska last April, we disconnected our home phone and have done without one since. The experiment has worked out pretty well. We get no sales calls. Friends can reach us wherever we are. I don't have to talk to his relatives and he doesn't have to talk to mine.
There are drawbacks, too. Some of our friends, and some of my relatives, can't always find the new number when they need it. Our fax machine is useless. And a home phone is never going to disappear on a field trip into the wilderness.
We retraced all of our steps. I dialed his number from my phone repeatedly, hoping we'd hear ringing from the mangroves, or the sand, or the tiny space between the bucket seat and the console.
Under intensive interrogation, the Prince admitted he couldn't be absolutely sure he'd had the phone on his belt when we left the house.
The phone did not reveal itself. We stopped for lunch and wandered through an art show, trying not to let lost-phone anxiety ruin the rest of the day.
Back at the estate, we launched a search which was immediately successful. The phone was on a shelf in the walk-in closet, where the Prince had set it down while choosing his ensemble for the day.
This was not his first cell phone adventure. There was the incident with the balcony and the snow bank at Lake Louise, Alberta, last spring. You can look up the story in the archives to the right, under "April."
I can't get too upset with the Prince over all this. My own phone has mysteriously vanished a number of times, although I've always been able to track it down before he found out. I also carry my phone into harm's way daily at the swimming pool where I work.
And if you're wondering what the terns above have to do with this story, the answer is: Nothing. We went to the National Seashore to shoot pictures of birds, and these were the only interesting ones we saw before we got distracted into a phone hunt.
Suddenly I heard an expletive behind me, and when I turned around, Prince Charming was clutching his stomach. Specifically, he was clutching the spot on his belt where his cell phone usually resides. It wasn't there.
We have become cell phone folks in our old age. When we left for Alaska last April, we disconnected our home phone and have done without one since. The experiment has worked out pretty well. We get no sales calls. Friends can reach us wherever we are. I don't have to talk to his relatives and he doesn't have to talk to mine.
There are drawbacks, too. Some of our friends, and some of my relatives, can't always find the new number when they need it. Our fax machine is useless. And a home phone is never going to disappear on a field trip into the wilderness.
We retraced all of our steps. I dialed his number from my phone repeatedly, hoping we'd hear ringing from the mangroves, or the sand, or the tiny space between the bucket seat and the console.
Under intensive interrogation, the Prince admitted he couldn't be absolutely sure he'd had the phone on his belt when we left the house.
The phone did not reveal itself. We stopped for lunch and wandered through an art show, trying not to let lost-phone anxiety ruin the rest of the day.
Back at the estate, we launched a search which was immediately successful. The phone was on a shelf in the walk-in closet, where the Prince had set it down while choosing his ensemble for the day.
This was not his first cell phone adventure. There was the incident with the balcony and the snow bank at Lake Louise, Alberta, last spring. You can look up the story in the archives to the right, under "April."
I can't get too upset with the Prince over all this. My own phone has mysteriously vanished a number of times, although I've always been able to track it down before he found out. I also carry my phone into harm's way daily at the swimming pool where I work.
And if you're wondering what the terns above have to do with this story, the answer is: Nothing. We went to the National Seashore to shoot pictures of birds, and these were the only interesting ones we saw before we got distracted into a phone hunt.
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