The Garfield Phone of Family Secrets
How this popular novelty item from the 1980s altered my perception of the differences between children and adults.
I firmly believe that every American child of the late 1980s and early 1990s remembers the Garfield phone. This bulky plastic cat of glossy orange and black, with the biggest, laziest eyes that opened and closed with a lift of the receiver, rang in many children’s bedrooms for years. In an era where those children are now adults, often with children themselves, the idea of a character-themed corded phone may be too much to comprehend, but it was a coveted item at the time.
Those who may have let this feline phone drift into their deep subconscious may remember a series of news reports from 2019 detailing hordes of these phones washing up from the Atlantic Ocean and onto French beaches. The short version of that report is that a shipping container of this once-common household item fell from a cargo ship and embedded itself in a deep sea trench, occasionally allowing its bright orange kittens out to play on land.
Despite the now-defunct Tyco Toy Company producing and distributing millions of these phones thirty years ago, copies in good condition can fetch upwards of $200 on eBay today. This phone is a mainstay of nostalgic merchandise from this time and certainly arouses strong memories in countless individuals. It opened my childish mind to the unknown world of adult conversation.
Truthfully, I don’t really know why I had this phone. I wasn’t a big fan of Garfield, and as a child, I didn’t have much use for a phone. I know it was a very early birthday gift from my Uncle Frank. Despite not being a big fan of the character, I was a fan of the phone; my attachment grew from my uncle being a very special person to my family. I cherished it, and it rested on my bedroom headboard, sitting proudly next to my Goosebumps collection.
Garfield rang one Sunday morning around my eighth birthday, and I answered. As was likely to happen occasionally in homes with multiple landline phones, I answered the call a split second after my mother picked up a receiver in another part of the house. When I put the phone to my ear, I heard my mother say, “Hello?”
“Terry?” my Aunt Pat asked, her voice panicked and uncertain. “Is Louis okay? Young Louis.”
I froze, the orange receiver pressing firmly into the side of my head. My palms began to sweat, and I felt tension in my shoulders. After all, I was young Louis. I tried to wrap my young mind around any possible reason for my Aunt Pat to worry about me. She was my mother’s younger sister and lived in Chicago, about eight hundred miles away from us. Here I was, doing just fine. I breathed as quietly as possible and listened intently as my aunt sobbed into the phone.
She detailed to my mother her awful nightmare of me having a severe stomach injury. There was pain. There was gore. It was devastating for me to hear and even more devastating for my aunt to experience. She woke from this dream with the haunting images in her head and called immediately to check on me. The dream was certainly one of those moments that betrayed all sensibilities and logic, but it plagued her all the same.
My aunt expressed relief when my mother confirmed that I was alright. They then continued discussing the situation in detail as she calmed down. My mind wandered as I listened. How could she think these awful things to be true? I was admittedly plagued by my own set of recurring nightmares, which regularly caused me to wake up with stomach cramps and aching legs, but I never felt that they were anything other than bad dreams. This was something different.
My mind wandered far enough for my breath to increase. As my breath increased, my ability to keep my eavesdropping secret diminished and my aunt asked if someone was on the other line. I hung up as quickly and quietly as possible, and Garfield’s eyes closed, along with my perception of any commonalities between children and adults.
Is sharing a nightmare the biggest secret in the world? Of course not. Did either my aunt or my mother ever tell me about this dream? No, they did not. What reasonable adult would relay the contents of an awful nightmare to a child if the nightmare had no actual effects on them?
To me, it didn’t matter. I was forever changed by knowing that my parents and, by extension, every adult had secrets that they didn’t share with children. I knew this already to a certain extent, but this was my first brush with the unknown, about which I didn’t receive a prompt: “This is an adult conversation; it’s not for kids.”
Now I had a secret, too.
Discovering that one’s parents are, in fact, human beings who have night terrors, make mistakes and bad decisions, and don’t know all the answers is part of growing up. Many of my peers, as parents in their thirties and forties, have long ago realized that their own parents were also just figuring things out as they went along.
How many other children worldwide learned of adults’ secret lives on their own Garfield phones? If not through a Garfield phone in the early 1990s, what of children finding out information online? Children today have much more access to information than I did thirty years ago. I often think of what my thirteen-year-old nephew absorbs by being a conscious human child surrounded by adults. I do not believe that children should be shielded from everything, but there are certain aspects of life that they can ignore for as long as possible. As a privileged, white, male American child, I know that my exposure to reality was less than most others in the world, and I think about how that has shaped me.
I think about what horrors of reality we have allowed some of our children to experience and how they deserve better.
To be clear, I do not classify my experience as horror; I consider it a pivotal moment in my development in more ways than one.
Within a year of overhearing this phone call, my Uncle Frank, who purchased this Garfield phone for me, died from complications of AIDS. An energetic and enthusiastic teacher and a gay man, my uncle also lived a life that I didn’t understand. My sister and I were not told what “gay” was — Uncle Frank and Uncle Jesse were just friends who lived together and loved us as their own children. We didn’t need to know any more than that.
As an adult, I understand, to a point. I don’t tell my thirteen-year-old nephew everything; I know his parents and grandparents don’t. Adults do what they can to protect children from the world’s harsh realities while raising them in it. Some of us have that privilege from a young age, and it shapes who we become. Looking back, there are some things I wish I’d known and some things I’m alright with not knowing.
Whenever I see a bright orange Garfield phone, I think about that bright Sunday morning. Through no fault of anyone but my own, at a young age, I quickly learned about the quiet and difficult conversations adults have when they think no children are nearby. Like a lazy cat sunning himself on a beach in southern France, I closed my eyes, listened, and learned a bit more about life.
