I know my own cell phone number by heart as well as my wife’s number. I can also sing a certain Jenny’s number thanks to Tommy Tutone (“8-6-7-5-3-0-9”). The only other number I can confidently recall is the landline of my childhood home, the one I dutifully memorized as a boy.

When I was older, I punched these digits into the pay phone outside the rec center after I was done playing pickup basketball. A buddy taught me to call collect and, instead of saying my name, deliver a short message — “Come and get me” — so that my father could get the message without accepting the charge.

This landline was the same number that I gave to friends and, once, wrote down at the top of a piece of loose-leaf notebook paper before tearing it off and handing it to a fellow freshman, an unusually bold move for me. I still remember the jolt of adrenaline as I passed my number, although I don’t recall if that young woman actually phoned me.

It’s the same number that we used for dialing up internet connections. It’s the number that, if we weren’t home or didn’t get to the phone in time, would spring the answering machine to life. It’s the number that I entered into my first flip phone as HOME.

This was the same number that I punched into the toy plastic phone in the church’s ancient (let’s say “vintage”) nursery before handing it to my firstborn toddler. “It’s for you,” I’d smile, and he’d chew on the plastic receiver.

The online White Pages inform me that the number is still registered to my father, although he has moved from my childhood home and no longer has a landline. I call Dad on his cell phone, which I don’t have memorized.

I don’t believe Dad ever felt comfortable with the collect call trick all those years ago. I think he felt like we were cheating the phone company, which we were. I’m grateful that he would always come and pick me up, then return me to the only home I knew as a child and as an adolescent — a constant that I did not fully appreciate, though it is a gift that sticks with me to this day.

Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of the book with Wipf and Stock Publishers titled This Is the Day: A Year of Observing Unofficial Holidays about Ampersands, Bobbleheads, Buttons, Cousins, Hairball Awareness, Humbugs, Serendipity, Star Wars, Teenagers, Tenderness, Walking to School, Yo-Yos, and More. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he is a student of joy.

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