Uphill, Both Ways

When I was little, I used to marvel at how old my mom was (because when you're five, someone in her late 30s seems positively ancient). It's because she'd tell me all these stories about how candy once cost a penny, phone numbers were only a few digits long, "gay" meant happy and "fag" meant cigarette, and pterodactyls used to chase her home from school. Okay. Maybe not the pterodactyls, but you get the point: the world was much different when my mom was a little girl.

Fast-forward to now, and I'm the one that's old. My kids think it's mind-boggling that I grew up without the Internet. I had to use encyclopedias to learn stuff, and - gasp - the library, where I looked stuff up in a non-computerized card catalog! (Dewey Decimal System, anyone?) I used an actual paper phone book when I wanted to prank call look up someone's number. And speaking of phones, you wanna know something I find hilarious? Like virtually every other child for the past, oh, thousand years or so, my kids have one of these:

But you know what they call it? A car. They call it a car. Because it has wheels. And because they have never seen a corded, rotary phone. The only phones they're familiar with are small, cordless, and have buttons to push. So their toy doesn't look like a "real" phone to them, hence the reason why they pull it around the house shouting "Vroom!" and "Beep beep!"

I'm going to get to tell my kids that I remember life before voicemail. That I used to have to actually stay tethered to the wall when I talked on the telephone. That I recieved my first cell phone for high school graduation, and that it was the size of a brick (and just as heavy) with a long-ass antenna. That my family had an 8-track player, and I remember when cassette tapes replaced 8-tracks, and then when CDs replaced cassettes. That I remember when VCRs and microwaves were fancy and expensive. That the soda machine at my dad's office dispensed tall glass bottles. That I didn't even know what an e-mail address was until I was in high school. And that, when I started driving, gas cost like 85 cents a gallon.

It's really gonna make me look old in their eyes, y'all.

Some of it even makes me laugh in amazement. Like the fact that inspired this whole post: I was telling Colin that when I was in elementary school, if you behaved badly enough, you got spanked. At school. With a wooden paddle that hung in the Principal's office. Can you imagine if any Principal tried to spank a kid these days?

It's crazy to think how much has changed since 1985, when I started Kindergarten. That's only 25 years - in the grand scheme of things, not all that long. I can only imagine what it's going to be like by the time my boys are in high school. I'll look totally archaic when they trade their backpacks for jet packs.