The Booster Seat

Listen my children
    and take a look,
That once upon a time
   there was a telephone book.
It had tissue thin pages
   and was paper bound,
Names, numbers, addresses
   inside were found.

Since everything reminds me of something else, it is no wonder that when my wife bought our
14-month-old grandson a booster seat that I immediately thought of the Manhattan telephone book. What, you wouldn't?

You have to be of a very certain age to remember telephone books. Every borough in NYC got theirs delivered, by a special delivery guy pulling a customized cart for stacking them, to every phone customer.

Somehow at the family flower shop in Manhattan we managed to get a phone book for every borough. We did this so we could call the intended reciepient of a flower delivery to ask if they were going to be home so we could make a delivery. Manhattan's phone book was by far the thickest; Staten Island's was the thinest.

I think Manhattan's was even thicker than Brooklyn's, despite I think Brooklyn having the larger population. Or, in the 1950s, that might not have been the case. No matter.

We kept the phone books in a bookcase near the telephone in the back of the store. Since this is where I did my homework, I was often staring at these books. I came away with the indelible observation that the word MANHATTAN when capitalized is composed entirely of letters with straight lines.

Also, each book contained the names of only a few, very few people I knew. I sort of marveled at that. I didn't know most of the people in those books. I might have been strange, and certainly have remained so.

Anyway, the booster seat remined me of meals at my grandmother's dining room table, probably birthday parties for my older cousin, when I was propped up with the Manhatttan—White, or Yellow Pages— beneath my butt. These were the thickest of all the city's phone books.

The pictured booster seat seen at the top of this posting is about the thickness of one of those Manhattan directories.

Matthew has outfrown his comfort zone of eating in the family heirloom, vintage wooden high chair; my high chair, and before that my older cousin's high chair from the 1940s, restored—again—for a new generation.

Matthew has gotten so used to eating at the special daycare tables they have where the kids fit into a cutout in a counter, that he's no longer interested in a childish high chair. He wants a seat at the table.

But in the 1950s no one was selling booster seats, Or, if they were, no one in the family bought one. And why would they when a handy phone book did the job?

Show up at a table and you weren't very big yet, someone would take a phone book down from the top of some piece of furniture and plop it under your butt. It's funny, but at home I don't remember sitting on a phone book. Maybe because the Queens directory didn't do the trick.

Phone books were even found in phone booths, another bygone piece of street furniture. You might be able to find someone's number in there, along with their address, if someone hadn't ripped the page out. You could call information, for free, but they wouldn't give you the address, only the phone number, which always struck me as strange but that's the way it was.

The Internet has of course changed everything. Now you can look up a number on your phone, which seems logical, but it is really quite an advancement. But now you'll have to buy a booster seat and you can't rely on the phone company to provide one. Sitting on a cell phone will only hide it and make your butt vibrate if someone calls it, not give you a boost at the table. Not advised.

Now if only the person I'm calling would pick up and not let it go to voicemail.

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