seven digit dialing

My mother just called to tell me that she's had the phone number at the house changed. This wouldn't really bother me, because I'm removed from the situation with my sister and Dimwit and I hardly ever call home anyway. But the phone number at our house has been the same ever since we moved to Austin in 1987. It was the first phone number I bothered to learn, and it's been the same number whether I was calling home to spend the night at Tracy's house, or asking for a ride home from somewhere, or one of the eight thousand calls that were calculated to be small lies and conceal my whereabouts when I was a teenager and I wanted to be somewhere else. I know the pattern of the number on the phone, the seven digits, five of them unique and the way it looks written on a million forms. That sequence always meant home.

So it makes me sad, and a little angry, and just all kinds of weird. Because it is a thing, and hardly even a tangible one at that, but it is a thing I've had for so long.