PAVLOVIA (PART II OF II)

APRIL 24, 2023 – (Cont.) And yet . . . I must confess that this same Pavlovian response (answering the phone spontaneously) has hacked its way into my cranial circuitry, albeit inconsistently. If certain people call me and I’m within earshot of my phone, I feel as if it’d be taken as a personal affront if I failed to answer before the second ring. In the case of my poor wife again, the concern is more the fear of giving offense. It’s a desire to remain loved and respected; to be responsive, responsible and ready to address whatever need arises. And to be alert to the possibility of addressing self-interest, such as when Beth calls from the instant beverage section of aisle five at the store and says, “I noticed that Ovaltine wasn’t on the list, but maybe you’re running low, so should I get some?” If I fail to answer before the second ring, she might well progress to aisle six or, who knows, out of the store altogether, and I’ll face the unhappy fate of drinking plain coffee without Ovaltine for the next several days, because in fact, I’m down to my last half teaspoon of it.

To ensure against such exigencies, when I acquired my iPhone, I spent a half hour playing around with its ringtone features, much as a farm kid back in the day you played around with grandpa’s old pick-up truck along the tractor road behind the barn. Without knowing exactly how and why, you learned to coordinate clutch, gas pedal and stick shift. Likewise with ringtones, you figure out how to assign one ringtone or another to someone in your “contacts.”

In this Age of Choices (unless you’re an American woman in certain states), however, I surveyed a list of ringtones as numerous as cereal brands at the store. I focused on assigning a special one to alert me to Beth’s calls. In a moment of self-defined amusement, I decided upon “Old Car Horn,” which for reasons I have yet to research, was adopted as an on-board alarm by the U.S. Navy—“A-OO-ga! A-OO-ga!”

The problem was that in practice, “A-OO-ga! A-OO-ga!” proved to be unduly unsettling, probably because of all the WW II movies I’ve watched in which “A-OO-ga!” is closely associated with incoming shells and the command, “Everyone to their battle stations!” When my phone barked, “A-OO-ga!” I experienced a sub-Pavlovian response—sudden twitching of the left eyelid—to the primary Pavlovian response of jumping whenever the phone rings.

Ironically, I wasn’t sufficiently Pavlovian, at least in the respect that most tech-savvy people are, most notably . . . my wife, who, upon experiencing an unsatisfactory encounter with an app, responds in classic Pavlovian fashion by reflexively adjusting the app. Don’t like that ringtone? Change it—immediately.

Me? Lacking the requisite Pavlovian response in this regard, I simply suffered with the undesirable ringtone.

Yesterday, inspired by a sudden burst of sunshine through the leaden, low-hanging overcast, I summoned the will to improve my life. I took a simple hike down my iPhone settings, as if strolling along a newly paved path in the park and followed freshly painted signs to the “Fountain of Ringtones.” While children floated their toy boats along the edge of the pond, I found amusement in the whimsical sounds produced by the fountain, its jets competing with one another for altitude. Scrolling down the list of enticing I junked “Old Car Horn” in favor of “By the Seaside.”

If life was good before the sunburst, it’s now vastly improved. When Beth next calls from aisle five—or from the car to ask me to retrieve a package in Pavlovian response to her USPS app alert that a delivery was made to or doorstep—my Pavlovian response will be to close my eyes, inhale a breath of imaginary warm seaside air and picture the two of us walking barefoot along the beach, delighting in the sight of waves washing the sand ahead and the sound of gulls floating carefree overhead in the breeze.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson