I’ve spent some of my happiest hours reading to our four grandchildren when they were little.

Not long ago, the two younger ones were curled up with me on the couch, when we all heard our landline phone ring in the kitchen. I ignored the ringing and turned the storybook’s page. We’d reached the scary part of the plot, where the baby bunny has wandered too far from her big brother in the meadow, and a cunning fox is hunting her.

On the third unanswered ring, though, my granddaughter looked worried. “Grandma, can’t you hear the phone? It’s ringing.”

“I can hear it, sweetheart,” I said, “but that’s not the family ringtone, so I don’t have to answer it right now. After we finish our book, I’ll check caller ID and see if anyone has left a message for Grandpa or me. First, though, let’s find out if the bunny’s family can find her before the mean fox catches her.”

My small booklovers snuggled closer and held their breath while the entire rabbit family and their neighbors spread out through the tall meadow grass, chased off the fox and rescued the baby bunny. Cookies and lemonade would help us recover from the book’s nearly unbearable dramatic tension, we decided. During snack time, the three of us agreed that the big brother deserved to be grounded, because he’d been busy painting Easter eggs, instead of watching out for his little sister.

After snack time, I finally checked for messages. The caller ID on our phone read, “Spam risk,” the equivalent of junk mail.

Our landline is a quaint novelty to our grandchildren, especially the younger two, who have known and used only cellphones since early childhood. They listened, wide-eyed, when I told them about the bulky black telephone in our kitchen during the 1950s. When someone wanted to make a call, they had to lift the phone’s handheld receiver off its cradle and wait for the telephone operator’s voice to ask, “Number, please.” They recited the number they wanted to call, and the operator, usually a woman, connected the call for them.

None of the actual telephone operators was as entertaining, though, as Ernestine, Lily Tomlin’s iconic character on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in”: “One ringy-dingy ... two ringy-dingies.”

When Lee and I finally got fed up with the irritating glut of spam and marketing calls on our landline, he programmed the phone with a special ringtone, designated only for members of our extended families. Whenever we hear that ringtone, one of us immediately heads for the kitchen phone. Otherwise, we let the call go to voicemail and check for a message soon afterward.

We live in an era of the ubiquitous cellphone. The special family ringtone on our landline reminds Lee and I that no other call is more important than hearing the voice of someone we love.

Craft Rozen writes about gardening and family life from her home in Moscow. She may be contacted at scraftroze@aol.com