First of all, I need to take a moment to thank 
chefmongoose. I got a package in the mail, a surprise to me. But I recognized his name, not to mention his post office. (What I don't know is how he got my mailing address. Asked me, at some point, is the logical supposition, although I don't remember it. That could be achieved by waiting a week and letting me forget.) The gift is a really sweet one: a small wooden coati figure. I didn't realize there were these things, but it's a handsome figure (of course) and I'm glad to receive it. Thank you.
Now, for the past week, my brother has been trying to organize a getting-together of between four and twelve people. As pretty much everyone in this circle has hand phones (I'm the exception there), Blackberries (my father and I are exceptions), e-mail, instant messaging (except me), and more and more contact options than you might imagine, this yields an enormous number of slightly missed contacts.
My father was on the phone with one of the prospective participants -- one of his friends, a lawyer from Connecticut who's all but retired. While talking with him on the kitchen phone, my father's hand phone, in his jeans pocket, chimed. My inclination is to let phones ring, since if you answer them they'll never learn to sleep through the night. But the complicated scheduling made it feel urgent that my father answer. So when the call with his friend ended, I smiled at my good fortune in setting up these circumstances, and told him, ``Your pants are ringing.''
Even if my father were not deaf, his, ``What?'' would have been the correct response.
The phone's ringing was a notice that it had a new voice mail message. The message was from this same friend, his saying that there was no response to my father on his hand phone, so he would call the home phone instead. Yes: he left a message that he was immediately calling.
I have to assume that when he was working full-time, he did extremely well on his billable hours.
Trivia: Henry Ford II discovered after becoming executive vice-president of Ford Motor Company in April 1943 that one department was still making Tri-Motor propellers, over a decade after the plane went out of production. Source: Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire, Ricahrd Bak.
Currently Reading: The Great Radio Heroes, Jim Harmon.