News item: "Cell tower unlikely to generate complaints from residents," Feb. 22. An Edina cemetery, according to the report, is seeking permission to rent space to Sprint for a cellular tower. It's the rare news story that conjures up good old-fashioned dread. If no one sees a problem here, let's turn to an expert. What would Rod Serling say?
"A forgotten cemetery in a sleepy American suburb -- a place where the dear departed repose in well-deserved peace. But this cemetery is no mere boneyard. It is a crossroads where Good Intentions Parkway meets Cost Containment Drive. As the caretakers of this hallowed ground are about to discover, there's no such thing as free long distance, and even in this age of instant communication, some calls arrive too soon. Submitted for your approval: a cellular phone company that thinks it can improve service with a tower among the tombstones. It doesn't know that all its calls will soon be coming from a new area code, and routed through the Twilight Zone."
A cursory review of some of Serling's actual monologues offers no clear point of view on the topic -- everything seems ambiguous, like the advice William Shatner got from the tabletop fortune-telling devil in "Nick of Time" (1960).
Here's one that touches on the subject:
"It's been said, and probably rightfully so, that what follows this life is one of the unfathomable mysteries; an area of darkness which we the living reserve for the dead, or so it is said."
Not much help there. How about this:
"A toy telephone, an act of faith, a set of improbable circumstances, all combine to probe a mystery, to fathom a depth, to send a facet of light into a dark after-region -- to be believed or disbelieved depending on your frame of reference."
Serling is dead now, but who knows? He might call at any moment. A cell tower to improve service in what's known as a "dead zone" would be irresistible to him. "The Twilight Zone" pioneered the concept of telephone hookups to the afterlife -- as in 1961's "Long Distance Call," in which a 5-year-old boy with a toy phone is lured by his late grandmother to attempt suicide, and in the 1964 episode "Night Call," in which an invalid receives mysterious calls over a downed phone line draped across her departed fiance's grave.
