Back in the days of playing games with the telephone (who, me? . . . as my halo breaks into devil horns, in keeping with the spirit of juvenilia) or not, the variations on the phone company's ring you heard after dialing the number involved partials. You could hang up during the latter part of a ring, call the number right back and get the remainder. And the charm was, not always. Sometimes it took seconds for the initial ring to kick in, sometimes it leaped out like the nephew of lightning it was. In our times it comes very quickly, predictably. Always whole rings, it seems.

Is anyone still with me?

I called a friend the other day and got that sliver of a first ring. He's a historian and not in any hurry to have caved in to various digital amenities. That includes his current phone, since there apparently are many options but all of them, by Henry Ford, digital. So it's interesting this happened calling him.