When my granddaughter asked me why there was a strange symbol painted on the old brick wall across from our house, I laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cYoung people,\u201d I told her. \u201cYou wouldn\u2019t believe what we used to do with that thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
She looked at me with the serious curiosity only a child can have.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat thing?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe pound sign.\u201d<\/p>\n
She frowned.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou mean the hashtag?\u201d<\/p>\n
I smiled.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, sweetheart. Before it became something you put on the internet, it was just a little metal symbol on the telephone.\u201d<\/p>\n
She sat beside me on the porch.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo what did you do with it?\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at the old photograph in my hands.<\/p>\n
And suddenly, I wasn\u2019t eighty-two anymore.<\/p>\n
I was eight.<\/p>\n
It was 1952.<\/p>\n
Our neighborhood was different then.<\/p>\n
Children played outside until the streetlights came on. Nobody had a cell phone. Nobody had a television in every room. Most families didn\u2019t even have a telephone.<\/p>\n
But our apartment building had one.<\/p>\n
It hung on the wall in the hallway, shared by everyone.<\/p>\n
And that telephone was where my best friend, Tommy, and I spent countless afternoons.<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t understand how it worked.<\/p>\n
We just knew there were two strange symbols beside the numbers.<\/p>\n
A star.<\/p>\n
And a pound sign.<\/p>\n
We thought they were buttons for secret games.<\/p>\n
Tommy was convinced the pound sign was some kind of emergency button.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you press it three times,\u201d he whispered one afternoon, \u201cthe police come.\u201d<\/p>\n
I believed him.<\/p>\n
So we never pressed it.<\/p>\n
Instead, we found another use for it.<\/p>\n
There was a metal pound sign printed on an old wooden board outside the telephone company office.<\/p>\n
And someone had drawn a grid around it.<\/p>\n
Tommy stared at it one day and said, \u201cIt\u2019s a Tic-Tac-Toe board.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
But that didn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n
We played anyway.<\/p>\n
Every afternoon, we\u2019d sit on the steps and play Tic-Tac-Toe on that strange symbol.<\/p>\n
He always chose X.<\/p>\n
I always chose O.<\/p>\n
He cheated.<\/p>\n
I accused him.<\/p>\n
He denied it.<\/p>\n
Then we\u2019d argue for five minutes before laughing and starting another game.<\/p>\n
Those were the happiest years of my childhood.<\/p>\n
Then, one summer morning, Tommy\u2019s family moved away.<\/p>\n
His father had lost his job, and they couldn\u2019t afford the apartment anymore.<\/p>\n
He came to say goodbye.<\/p>\n
He handed me a little marble he\u2019d kept in his pocket.<\/p>\n
\u201cKeep it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you\u2019ll remember me.\u201d<\/p>\n
I gave him my favorite hair ribbon.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you\u2019ll remember me too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he climbed into the back seat of his father\u2019s car.<\/p>\n
I ran behind it until I couldn\u2019t anymore.<\/p>\n
I never saw him again.<\/p>\n
Life moved forward.<\/p>\n
I grew up.<\/p>\n
I married.<\/p>\n
I had children.<\/p>\n
My husband and I worked hard, bought a small house, and filled it with noise, laughter, arguments, birthdays, and Christmas mornings.<\/p>\n
The world changed around us.<\/p>\n
Telephones became smaller.<\/p>\n
Then they became cordless.<\/p>\n
Then they became computers.<\/p>\n
And eventually, that little pound sign became something almost everyone knew.<\/p>\n
The hashtag.<\/p>\n
But whenever I saw it, I thought about Tommy.<\/p>\n
About the boy who believed pressing it three times would bring the police.<\/p>\n
About the boy who cheated at Tic-Tac-Toe.<\/p>\n
About the marble still sitting in a small box in my bedroom after all those years.<\/p>\n
Then, one afternoon, my granddaughter came running into the house.<\/p>\n
\u201cGrandma! You have to see this!\u201d<\/p>\n
She was holding her phone.<\/p>\n
She showed me a picture she\u2019d found online.<\/p>\n
It was an old photograph of our neighborhood.<\/p>\n
And there, in the background, was the building where Tommy had lived.<\/p>\n
My heart stopped for a moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere did you find this?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSomeone posted it in a local history group.\u201d<\/p>\n
I stared at the screen.<\/p>\n
Then I noticed the name of the person who had posted it.<\/p>\n
Thomas Miller.<\/p>\n
My hands began to shake.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d I whispered.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s him.\u201d<\/p>\n
My granddaughter looked at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy Tommy.\u201d<\/p>\n
She found the man\u2019s profile.<\/p>\n
He was an old man now.<\/p>\n
White hair.<\/p>\n
Glasses.<\/p>\n
A gentle smile.<\/p>\n
And beneath his photograph was a sentence:<\/p>\n
\u201cStill looking for the little girl who used to play Tic-Tac-Toe with me on the steps.\u201d<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t speak.<\/p>\n
My granddaughter looked at me, then back at the screen.<\/p>\n
\u201cGrandma\u2026 what\u2019s your name?\u201d<\/p>\n
I laughed through my tears.<\/p>\n
\u201cApparently, I\u2019m still waiting for my turn.\u201d<\/p>\n
She helped me send him a message.<\/p>\n
For several hours, there was no response.<\/p>\n
Then my phone chimed.<\/p>\n
One message.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs this really you?\u201d<\/p>\n
I typed back:<\/p>\n
\u201cI still have the marble.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three dots appeared.<\/p>\n
Then disappeared.<\/p>\n
Then appeared again.<\/p>\n
Finally, his reply came.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still have your hair ribbon.\u201d<\/p>\n
I covered my mouth.<\/p>\n
For seventy years, I had believed that little piece of my childhood was gone.<\/p>\n
But it hadn\u2019t been.<\/p>\n
Neither had he.<\/p>\n
A few weeks later, Tommy came to visit me.<\/p>\n
We were both old.<\/p>\n
Our hands trembled.<\/p>\n
Our knees hurt.<\/p>\n
We had grandchildren.<\/p>\n
Great-grandchildren.<\/p>\n
Entire lifetimes between us.<\/p>\n
But when he saw me standing on the porch, he smiled exactly the way he had when we were eight.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou still cheat at Tic-Tac-Toe?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
He laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly when you\u2019re not looking.\u201d<\/p>\n
We sat together for hours, remembering things neither of us had spoken about in decades.<\/p>\n
Before he left, he pulled something from his pocket.<\/p>\n
A small, faded marble.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told you I\u2019d keep it.\u201d<\/p>\n
I smiled.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I told you I\u2019d keep mine.\u201d<\/p>\n
We sat quietly for a while.<\/p>\n
Then he looked at the old telephone symbol carved into the railing beside us.<\/p>\n
\u201cFunny,\u201d he said. \u201cWe thought that thing was so important.\u201d<\/p>\n
I shook my head.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, Tommy.\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at him.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was never the pound sign that mattered.\u201d<\/p>\n
He smiled.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was who was standing beside it.\u201d<\/p>\n
And for the first time in seventy years, we played Tic-Tac-Toe again.<\/p>\n
This time, neither of us cared who won.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When my granddaughter asked me why there was a strange symbol painted on the old brick wall across from our house, I laughed. \u201cYoung people,\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-viral-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17066"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17068,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17066\/revisions\/17068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/viralscontent.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}