I was enjoying the blissful mental stupefaction that only television can create when the headache-inducing electronic tone blared from beside the bed.

My reaction, which I suspect resembled nothing so much as what happens to a human when an experiment with electricity goes awry, was immediate.

I nearly tumbled off.

This might well have resulted in a fracture.

Certainly it would have been painful.

Our mattress is elevated, and I am not nearly as agile as I once was.

Besides which there is an electric guitar and an amplifier wedged against the wall, both capable of causing blunt force trauma and, in the case of the guitar, a variety of what forensic pathologists call penetrating injuries.

The strip of space between the bed frame and the wall is so narrow, perhaps 2 feet, that in my clumsiness I sometimes brush a leg (more often a pillow) across the guitar strings.

The sound that yanked me so rudely from the comfortable coaxial cable catatonia heralded nothing important.

The house was not afire.

It was only the telephone ringing. Which, after all, is what the thing is supposed to do when someone is trying to get through.

This, however, was the landline telephone.

A decidedly uncellular instrument.

Almost an anachronism, the telephonic equivalent to a cassette tape or a carburetor.

The phone’s shrill warbling shocked me only because it is so infrequent.

I hadn’t realized how rare the sound is until it interrupted my stupor.

As many people nowadays do — and perhaps most — my family conducts the large majority of our remote conversations with our cellphones.

We have kept our landline neither from nostalgia nor from a lingering distrust in the latest technology.

Apathy is the more accurate explanation.

We just sort of forgot.

My wife, Lisa, and I have discussed on occasion over the past few years doing away with this fragment of antiquity.

(Most often, it seems to me, when the Spectrum bill, which includes the TV and internet tolls, has been ripped from its envelope and propped, like a murderer’s knife still dripping blood, on the kitchen counter, the better to nag at my conscience.)

But maintaining a landline costs quite a bit less than either broadband internet or having a couple hundred channels, most of which serve no other purpose than to put me in the somnolent state wherein I’m easily frightened by loud noises such as ringing phones.

I suspect, though, that my lack of interest in severing this particular connection isn’t solely the product of laziness.

I probably also harbor, in one of those cranial crannies where our subconscious holds sway, a shred of loyalty to the old-fashioned telephone.

It could hardly be otherwise, I suppose.

Since I was old enough to be aware of such things, I have never lived in a home or apartment that was not equipped with such a phone.

(The lone partial exception was my freshman year at the University of Oregon, when I lived in a dorm. My room had no phone, but there was one in the hallway nearby. This was in 1988-89, and the only cellphone I had seen was the one Gordon Gekko lugged around the beach in the movie “Wall Street.”)

I don’t recall when I bought my first pair of cordless phones, but I have probably owned half a dozen sets over the past three decades or so.

(I’m sure cordless phones were, and perhaps still are, available as single units. But whenever I went shopping the selection, which probably reached its apex along about Clinton’s first term, seemed to consist exclusively of two-packs, with one charging station that included an answering machine — the command center, you might call it — and a second, purely utilitarian unit. The latter was relegated to a bedside table, ideally placed to scare TV watchers.)

As with most electronic devices, the longevity of cordless phones depends in part on how often they’re used.

Our current pair is several years old, and perhaps as much as a decade. But I haven’t detected any of the signs of imminent failure — buttons which fail to work unless you give them a firm thump with your thumb, dwindling battery life — that afflicted the others.

But we used those almost every day.

(And were rarely frightened when they rang.)

Yet it’s not the series of cordless models that stretch back over the years that I remember most vividly on the rare occasions when I ponder telephones.

It’s the true antiques — the unabashedly analog rotary phones of my childhood home.

These were hefty things, with Bakelight cases capable of driving 10-penny nails, and cords that were long but never quite long enough to afford the caller privacy when he was fumbling through a conversation with a girl from school, a sequence of extended silences interrupted by flurries of inanities that brings a flush to my cheeks just thinking about them four decades later.

We had two such phones, and I can conjure with little effort their colors, both hues that were produced in great quantities during the 1960s and ’70s and were slathered on all manner of items, including, appallingly to modern eyes, countertops, flooring and appliances such as refrigerators and stoves.

One phone was an orange that only chemistry, rather than a citrus tree, could produce.

The other was a pale yellow whose only organic source, in my experience, is a baby with a stomachache.

Even as so many more recent, and consequential, matters have dissipated from my memory, gone as thoroughly as morning fog on a summer day which is destined to be torrid, I can immediately summon both our home phone number and those of both sets of grandparents.

(The latter two, curiously, differed by a single digit out of the seven.)

Perhaps it is this persistence of memory, this sense of permanence, that has prevented me from finally severing the last land-based communication cord.

Even cordless phones have to be tethered to the wall, after all.

My cellphone, by contrast, can get away from me, like a clever puppy, even when I’m sure I know where I last saw it.