"What in our youth were we deprived of that kids of today might take for granted?"My grandmother saw a lot in her long life. She raised some of her children in a house without electricity or running water. Food was kept cold in a hole in a nearby creek on warm days. Preserves were pickled and jarred for the winter months. My grandfather hunted deer to give the family a supply of meat. By the time my father--the youngest--came along, electricity and plumbing ran through the house and an automobile was parked in the yard. However, Dad attended a two-room school house until he was a young teenager. He had to hold the antenna to get a clear enough picture of the hockey game on the black-and-white television set. Before my grandmother passed away, she had witnessed such domestic innovations as the vacuum cleaner, the washer-dryer, Jell-O, Windex and the microwave oven.
As I watch my little boy nod off in his Fisher Price electric swing, I wonder what of my generation will he look back and marvel at when he grows up? What in our youth were we deprived of that kids of today might take for granted?
I don't know about you, but I think I had a pretty good childhood. I grew up in a peaceful neighbourhood with plenty of parks to play in, a wooded area to build forts in, a backyard to chase the dog in and an above-ground pool to splash about in. As my sister, brother and I got older, we were lucky to get a Nintendo gaming system from Santa Claus, complete with Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, Paper Boy and Tetris. We blew into the cartridges or wedged them into place when they didn't function properly in the machine. Sometimes we'd give the machine a good whack when it wasn't behaving, followed by a carefully timed sequence of mashing down the power button. We struck gold the day Dad came home from the flea market with a cartridge containing 96 games in one. Who cares if 25 per cent of the games were in a foreign language? I don't think we ever grasped the rules to Mahjong.
My dad gave
me his first work computer when his company provided him with an upgraded one. It was a "portable" Kaypro II. It weighed a ton. It held two floppy disks. The green-on-black screen was tiny. You could knock someone out with the massive keyboard. I loved it. We fought over who got to play the next round of Space Invaders; I also wrote my first short stories on it and proudly printed them off on Dad's dot matrix printer. Ah, don't you remember the shrill sound of the dot matrix? Dad would have to print off two hours' worth of reports on some nights. The volume on the television set would get progressively louder and louder as the pile of accordion-folded pages grew and grew.Television. Forget remote controls. I think my parents had children so that we could change the channel for them. One of us would have to reluctantly get out of our seat, pound the two-digit channel onto the calculator-like grid of the wood-encased colour TV, and usually have our prime spot next to Mom stolen by one of the other siblings. At least our folks didn't make us hold the antenna if the picture was fuzzy. We had an outdoor antenna that towered over the roof of the house. Dad had rigged up an indoor rotor that spun the antenna in any direction to get the best signal. We weren't allowed to touch that. God only knows what it looked like from outside when we did get our hands on it. I can imagine it rotating 720 degrees one way, 90 degrees the other way, and then another 360 degrees. At a relatively high speed.
I remember the summer our town finally got cable television. I was thirteen. Prior to that, I had made friends with the new girl in school who lived up the street. We went on bike rides, lounged in the pool, played our cassette tapes. Our friendship fizzled out as soon as she discovered MusiquePlus. We spent a few days in her air-conditioned house watching a constant loop of music videos in silence. Eventually, I knew I didn't have a chance, so I quietly left her living room.
And then I discovered music! And mix tapes--real mix tapes on actual cassettes. I listened religiously to the radio, my finger pressed down on the "pause" button, until my song came on the air. I hummed along, proud of myself for capturing the very first note of the song. And then, with fifteen seconds left to go, I cursed the damn DJ for getting on the air prematurely to announce the latest bloody contest. My mix tape perfection was ruined.
I cried the day 990 Hits stopped playing Top 40 and became an oldies station. What were we going to listen to now on the AM-only radio in my mother's Chevette?
When I got older, I used to tape the late-night college radio shows to hear new sounds that not even MusiquePlus played yet. That's how I discovered the Smashing Pumpkins. I couldn't help but smile the day I overheard one of the cool kids on the bus say, "Have you heard that song Today by the Smashing Pumpkins?" to which his friends grunted, "No." I was ahead of the game, musically! I thought. Don't worry, cool kid. They'll catch on one day. I was on to the next band by the time the Pumpkins released that shit double album.
This blog post could go on for days, now that I think of it. I only touched on a fraction of the technological changes we've seen in our generation. I haven't even uttered the "I" word, yet. The Internet--which became a part of our household in 1998--really has changed everything. With the Internet, how will my son write a class project? How will he make friends? How will he feel, considering I have shared photos of and anecdotes about him to friends and complete strangers alike--to masses of people--without his consent? Ugh, my head hurts just thinking about it.
It has been one hour since I began writing this blog entry. My baby is still sound asleep in his Fisher Price electric swing. Back in my day, my mother would have had to wind up the hand-crank swing a handful of times, risking waking me up with each turn of the handle.
Well, thank goodness for change.
