After 40 years of cell phones, a love letter to land lines

Sometimes, when I am home alone, the red phone rings downstairs. It's a rotary phone from eBay. Candy-apple red. Made by International Telephone & Telegraph. I bid $63.13 for it two years ago because we needed a land line for our Internet -- at least this is what Comcast led us to believe -- and so why not get an old rotary phone, because how cool are we, with our disposable income and throwback tastes? The phone's bell is deadened by decades of wear, so the ringing sounds muffled and far away, ...