What we talk about when we talk to Genoa Jeff

When I was in high school I was one of those girls who spent hours on the phone. It was before the days of cordless phones, so I had an extra-long cord and I could cover my entire bedroom while chatting. We'd talk and do other things; they were less like conversations and more like just keeping each other company. We didn't have email or texts or facebook, so it was the phone.

I had a handful of friends I could turn to for these non-ending phone calls. Most of them were not my boyfriends, as my boyfriends weren't very interested in the rambling chatfest. It takes a certain type of person to be on the phone for hours and hours.

One of my phone friends was Genoa Jeff. I met Genoa Jeff when we were in the All-Ohio State Fair Band together. The AOSFB was three weeks away from home with 300 other band dorks. I loved every minute of it. I honestly don't remember how close Genoa Jeff and I were when we were at the fair, but he lived just close enough that calling each other wasn't long distance, so we could spend hours on the phone.

Genoa Jeff was skinny and sarcastic and smoked all the time. Looking back, I realize that he must have hated living in small-town Ohio (heck, Genoa wasn't even big enough to actually be a town), and he envied me, living in the big city of Toledo. He would ask for all the details of my high school, what music we were playing, how many people were in the band, did we really have ten tubas in the marching bands? Being a high school girl, I couldn't be more thrilled to talk for hours about my life, so it was the perfect arrangement.

We would talk and talk, until my dad kicked me off the phone. What in the world did we talk about? I suppose it doesn't really matter. We just told each other the stories from our day, no doubt editing our lives to make them more interesting or dramatic. Our lives barely overlapped, so any artistic license was purely for entertainment.

I'm not sure when we lost touch. He just sort of faded from my life, and, when I realized that he was gone, it was too late. I wonder what happened to Genoa Jeff. The sad truth is that I don't even know his last name, and googling "Genoa Jeff" isn't any help. So I just remember, long talks about nothing and everything.

(Thanks to Bru, who inspired this post.)