After his 90th birthday celebration in Columbia, Missouri, Dec. 28, 2025, my brother, Bruce, asked if I could remember our telephone number when we lived at 4930 Thekla Ave.
I said that, back when the first two digits were letters, it was Evergreen 3752. Then, it became EV3-3752. In 1952, our parents divorced. Then, Bruce enlisted in the Air Force. I dropped out of school and went to work at International Shoe Company. Later, I moved in with my dad, stepmother, Berniece and stepsister, Maurine, to 3904 Oakwood in suburban St. Louis. What follows is my recollection of that conversation.
After the plates were stacked and Solo cups lay tipped like little drums along the folding tables of the hall, the last of friends and family had said good night. Banners sagged; the slideshow still played; December pressed its cold against the glass. Ninety years passed gently on the screen.
He sat beside me, candles’ smoke still ghosting in the air. ”Ed,” he said, “Do you remember our old telephone number? The one at 4930 Thekla Ave., before the world changed, before it all broke open?”
The past slid open like a desk drawer stuck. “It was Evergreen 33752. At first just Evergreen 3752 — before the company added a digit. I can’t recall 3904 Oakwood’s number, when Dad and Berniece kept their smaller place.”
Two addresses, the numbers rearranged. Strange how a life can pivot on such things: a street, a prefix, syllables; a sound we dialed with turning wheels and patient clicks.
1952: the year split wide. Our parents’ voices sharpened into knives; doors closed like verdicts in the tiny house. The radio kept playing through the dark as if the world were not unthreading us.
Bruce, already taller than the rest, signed papers with the Air Force recruiter’s pen. I pictured ink as black as engine oil. He left with one small suitcase and a grin too brave for someone not yet 20 years old. Jets stitched their silver seams across the sky; I traced each one and called it Bruce departing.
So I dropped out. I walked away from school and took a job at International Shoe — an office boy, a nothing job. Two decades after Tennessee Williams had that job. I stayed sober. After months in a room, an interim space that’s vanished from my mind, I moved to Dad and Berniece’s house, the new house, where Maurine, Berniece’s daughter, my new stepsister, already lived, had her claim to rooms and routines I would have to learn.
Strange, to arrive as a stranger in a house where someone else’s daughter was already home, where I became a kind of interloper, grafted onto someone’s trunk. Maurine and I — we circled warily at first, two teenagers thrust together by our parents’ choices. We learned the awkward dance of blended families, the careful negotiations over bathroom time, the unspoken rules of kitchen territory, the slow accommodation of shared space.
Three-nine-zero-four. The Thekla numbers rearranged, as we’d been rearranged, a shuffled deck. And Maurine was part of that shuffle, Berniece’s daughter folded into Dad’s life, as I was folded into Berniece’s, all of us learning to call this mixture “family,” all of us pretending that the numbers in different order could still add up.
Yet sometimes, dialing home, I hear the older number in my head — Evergreen — the evergreen of time. Tonight, at 90, Bruce repeats the word, and then — perhaps from dream or memory — I see again the street as it once was: the cracked tarmac, the sycamores dank with rain, boys racing their sleds, the air-raid siren moaning practice war.
We think the future waits beyond the hill; we do not know it’s dialing us already.
Somewhere a phone begins its patient ring. We answer. No one speaks our names, only the soft electric hum of years. Bruce laughs. “Funny what a man recalls.” We rise, turn out the lights, and lock the door. Snow fills our footprints almost as we walk, erasing paths we swear we still can see — while far away, like wires under frost, those numbers glow, carrying past imaginings.