Next time you’re walking around the city or some other major location like an airport, keep your eyes peeled for pay phones. Land lines. I’ve already lost Gen Z. Corded phones, to them, are a foreign concept or at the very best: something people in ’90s movies used to speak into.

The land line is a relic, my friends. And pay phones are the Easter eggs of urban landscapes. Find one, and you’re magically transported to a pre-digital era, not that long ago in human terms, but may as well be millennia for our computer successors who’ve rapidly accelerated the rate at which technology evolves.

I’m happy to say I remember the home phone number, fondly. We even enjoyed a rotary phone in my early childhood. Someone would call and the whole abode would ring with excitement at an analog contraption that everyone in the entire household shared. There was a phone station, in fact, where the telephone sat atop a thick phonebook. We set a chair beside the phone so that you had somewhere to sit on long calls. At home, phone calls were an event, whether dialing out to someone you knew or spontaneously receiving that tolling bell from somewhere else in the world.

I knew every one of my friend’s phone numbers by heart. And if they lived within the same area code, you only had to remember seven digits. You had to dial ‘1’ and an additional three digits preceding any number whose physical location resided a long distance away. In those days, I felt a greater sense of geography dialing out to sometimes far-flung destinations. Those calls cost more, since electricity had to travel farther. Nowadays, I carry a Boston area code in the Greater Bay Area of San Francisco, on my cell. The area code today only indicates where a number may have originated; but not necessarily where it’s currently calling from.

If my present-day Android could call the past, I’d dial up this pay phone in the Cornerstone Pub and tell my younger self to go to bed—it was probably past 1 a.m. in this photo. And that I wouldn’t find whatever I was searching for at the bottom of a beer bottle.

Sort of a 4th-dimensional intervention, I guess.