I so clearly remember the absolute horror I felt when my father described to me his childhood. What do you mean you didn’t have color TVs? How do you listen to a show on the radio? No tape players? How did your grandmother do the laundry? How much did the movies cost? You couldn’t have copies made? No electric typewriters? WHAT was your phone number? How could a phone number have a word in it. How far did you walk to school? In the snow? Uphill?
And now, it’s a game I’ve inadvertently fallen into with my children. Yesterday they went to get their flu shots. Which I still call flu shots. Even though what they got was actually a flu nasal mist.
“It’s a new thing, guys! It squirts up your nose. It won’t hurt at all!”
“Did you mind getting flu shots when you were a kid?” Doodles asked me.
“Actually, we didn’t have flu shots when I was a kid. They weren’t invented yet.”
“REEEEAAALLLY? So what did you do?”
I shrug. “I guess we got the flu!”
It’s funny, we joke about the kids not knowing why we say “dial the phone” when there’s clearly no dial. But the kids play these games, where I hear Doodles saying things like, “Check us out at jumpingonthebed.com!” or he’ll say to me when I don’t know the answer to something, “Can’t you look on the computer? Use Google.”
I wonder if I’m being naive but it seems like the distance between my father’s childhood and mine is shorter than that between my childhood and my children’s. (And why my father and not my mother? My mother never told as many stories about her childhood, so I don’t have the same frame of reference there.) In other words, life in the 1940s was different from life in the 1970s, but not as much as life in the 1970s is different from life in the 2000s.
In my pre-twelve year old life, we had multiple TVs, but no computer, no cable. Our first computer came in 1980, when we bought a TRS-80 Model III with a cassette drive and what we called “the red button of death” (press it and with no confirmation, everything you worked on disappeared forever). I took BASIC programming my senior year of high school, which put me ages ahead of most of my peers in computer literacy. I didn’t get my MTV until high school. I remember begging my parents–pleading–in the late ’70s for a princess phone. Remember the smell of dittos in elementary school? Ah, the scent of the mimeograph machine.
My son is conversant on using the iPod. My daughter can pause live TV. Doodles begs for time to play the new game on pbskids.com. The both receive their party invitations on evite. “Let’s watch a DVD!” they plead. Pie is capable of displaying all the photos on my iPhone to her friends.
Well, just wait. One of these days they’ll ask for the own cell phones. And I’ll look at them as if they are crazy and say, “You know, when I was a kid, I had what was called a ‘party line,’ and I couldn’t even call my friends when I wanted and I had to get off the phone when a neighbor wanted to us it.” (True story of my brief life in Colorado before returning to my rightly position as a Floridian.) And then when they stare at me in horror, I’ll explain how I had to ride my bike to school, two miles, in hurricanes, uphill… in both directions. See my childhood wasn’t that different from my father’s.
And if you look further into past, there was no difference at all. Growing up in 1740 and 1770? Same thing!