My home phone blared its distinctive, atonal warbling, and when I saw the name on the caller ID screen I felt a small thrill.

It was that particular and pleasant sort of anticipation that can happen when your past suddenly, and without warning, barges into an otherwise nondescript day.

The call itself was unusual.

Our landline is largely silent in the cellular era, and rather more than half the calls, I should judge, are computer-generated enticements of a financial or political nature that I end quickly and without remorse.

We’d probably drop the service except the cost is negligible.

But there is too a certain nostalgia associated with a “regular” phone, even a cordless model as ours of course is.

Lacking a cord, it more resembles a cellphone than the rotary dial, Bakelite behemoths that were ubiquitous until Americans decided, probably when Reagan was living in the White House, that they were too busy to be restricted by a cord, like a puppy that can’t yet be trusted not to run off and dig up the neighbor’s begonias.

We had as I recall two such phones in the home where I grew up. Both were painted in a garish shade which defined the 1970s as much as disco and bellbottoms did. One was pale yellow, the other a headache-inducing orange.

Those analog phones, tethered to copper wires, could induce anticipation, too — except you had to wait to hear whose tinny voice was coming through the speaker. (A certain girl’s, if you were exceedingly, almost unbelievably, lucky.)

Not so with caller ID, where you see the name before you hear the voice.

The caller, if I may be so bold as to pinch a snatch of lyrics from the legendary Billy Joel, was “an old friend, we used to be real close.”

We both grew up in Stayton. He was my classmate starting in kindergarten, a fact I can confirm by looking at the class photo my mom so thoughtfully kept over the decades.

Our friendship varied in its closeness over our school years — the usual vagaries of kids as they navigate the hormonal labyrinth of relationships which seemed so vital then and so silly now.

But it was constant, our connection, and comforting in its reliability. There were periods when we didn’t spend much time together outside of school, and my memory, though hardly a reliable source, insists that some of those periods might have lasted a year or more.

Yet every fall, when we reconvened in the hallways and classrooms, whether in the elementary school or the middle school or the high school, his face was one of the familiar ones, among a few dozen kids in our small town (Stayton’s population in the 1970s and 1980s rose from around 3,200 to 5,000) who were classmates for each of the 12 years.

We went to different colleges but have stayed in touch, after a fashion, in the 35 years since we graduated from high school. There was an occasional phone call. For a while we played Words With Friends on our phones. And infrequently we would meet in person — something of a challenge since he still lives in the Stayton area.

When I saw his name on the caller ID screen I remembered our last meeting. He was on vacation with his family at Wallowa Lake, and we spent a couple hours there, wading in the cold water and reminiscing.

It struck me, with a dismaying force, that we probably hadn’t spoken, even on the phone, since.

Only later did I scroll through my text messages and realize that our meeting at Wallowa Lake happened in July 2017.

This was, I was certain, the longest interval in our friendship. This saddened me, as all missed opportunities do when the only culprit is my own sheer apathy.

We talked for half an hour or so, and during those minutes the nearly six years since we last met seemed inconsequential. Which is as it should be, I suppose, in a friendship that spans nearly half a century.

We talked, as old acquaintances are apt to do, about the past and the present, the conversation meandering smoothly through the years. This is the true magic, I think, of a resilient friendship — that it can transform murky memories into recollections with a brilliant clarity.

When you recall distant events, particularly those from childhood, it’s not uncommon to feel sad because we know we can’t go back. Time is a great solvent, stripping away the unpleasant residue and leaving only pure distilled nostalgia. Little wonder that we tend to yearn for the era when our responsibilities were few and not terribly taxing.

But it’s much different, it seems to me, when you can confront those memories and have as your companion a friend who was also there, someone whose memories are, in a very real way, your memories.

As we talked, my friend and I, my feelings weren’t maudlin. Rather than lament that I will never again be the child I was, I basked in the lingering glow of the past, content to remember fun days with someone who was a friend and, no matter how many years pass, still is.