Paul Fredenberg | Contributor

“Do you like unicorns?”

“What are you having for lunch?”

“Are you coming to my birthday party?” she continued, never mind the party wouldn’t be for another eight months.

Maryanna, our 5 year old, was chattering away on the phone. I had heard it ring and was too slow to reach it.

While my cell phone, email and Facebook are typically aflame in activity, I rarely get contacted via the home landline anymore. Occasionally the library calls looking for funds to replace a missing Thomas the Tank Engine book or my alma mater calls looking for funds to replace an entire library. But otherwise I can go months without a legitimate home phone call.

I have even noticed a sudden, precipitous drop in calls from the telemarketers. Must be the economy, I’ve been thinking.

Presuming my parents or one of her aunts to be on the other end I waited patiently for Maryanna to pass the phone to either Alison or me.

The kids love to talk, to have an outlet, a forum for undivided attention. Normally Alison and I are the targets of the ceaseless lines of earnest questioning. “Yep,” we say too often, “uh huh,” as dinner is made, the dollhouse is fixed, a bill is paid, or a particularly tricky diaper is changed. The phone, and an unsuspecting caller, is another means to the end.

When someone from the Cub Scouts recently called me on my cell, he cited several days worth of efforts to contact me on the home line.

“Oh, sorry, no one ever checks the answering machine,” I apologized.

“No, I got through several times,” the Cubmaster said, “but it was always one of the little kids.”

Accounts of newly-built bird nests, detailed inventories of recent owies and a particularly earnest discussion of modern doll naming conventions ensued. But the phone never made it to me, the intended recipient.

Our problem is as much a spatial as a statistical problem. With seven kids and just two adults, at any one time the kids are several times more likely to be close to the phone than are the parents.

More phones would, in theory at least, solve the problem. Heaven knows we’ve tried, over the years, buying several expensive cordless phone systems with many multiples of handsets. But it's been months since I've seen a single one of them, and I suspect that, at any given moment, there are several tucked between the couch cushions or buried deep in the dress-up box. At least one of them might have been the source of that mysterious, unusually stubborn toilet clog months ago.

“Whatever it is,” said the Roto Rooter technician, “we’ll obliterate it,” thereby unintentionally echoing the collective, unspoken mantra of our kids when it comes to anything of technological or monetary value.

The only phone that is guaranteed to work is the $10 corded phone we bought for use during emergencies like power outages, severe storms and natural or geopolitical disasters. When we hooked it up I never thought its use would be precipitated by a toilet clog.

“Guess, what?” Maryanna continued, “last week we went to the DIA.” And then, sensing confusion on the other end, she added, “It’s an art place in Detroit with murals.”

“Do you like fruit?” she said, pausing for a split second to catch her breath, “because I really like strawberries and oranges and also apples.”

The torrent showed no signs of stopping, and I considered butting in and putting an end to it. But I remembered a time when the phone could not be pried easily from my ears.

Back in college Alison and I went to school thousands of miles apart. In the days before unlimited voice plans, we spent hundreds of dollars a month we didn’t have just to stay in touch. I decided to give Maryanna another minute. My parents are probably really enjoying it anyway, I thought.

I took the kitchen trash out, grabbed the mail and rearranged a few bikes in the garage. On the dingy floor, next to a Rubbermaid filled with my old baseball cards and just steps from the lawn mower, I inexplicably find one of the missing cordless phones.

A minute or two later, when I arrived back inside, the yammering had ceased, Maryanna had vanished, and the receiver had been neatly hung back in place. I wondered who she had been talking to.

I checked the caller ID on the newly-found cordless phone: a telemarketer.

And so, at that very moment, deep in the bowels of a call center somewhere in South Dakota, as a man in a cubicle typed notes into a big database, I became the newest member of the world’s most effective “do not call” list.

Paul Fredenberg lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and seven children. He can be reached at psfredenberg@gmail.com.