Back In My Day

My maternal Grandma had one of those big wooden radios that so many households owned back in the early thirties. I remember being quite young and marveling at all the buttons and knobs, while she told about the olden days when they didn’t have any televisions and they had to sit and listen to the radio.

I had the hardest time imagining how incredibly difficult and challenging it must have been to grow up with no television. How did people manage? How on earth did people survive the boredom that laid on the land before the shiny era of the television? How?

Simply by virtue of being a Grandma, she seemed old to me, but the whole “no television, only radio” thing was the real marker for me of a leap in generational technology.

I have wondered before just what was to be the gadget of my age that marked me as coming from another era like Grandma’s radio did her. I wondered what was going to become my big, “Back in my day” speech topic. Turns out that a very sweet 11 year old boy answered the question for me.

“Hey, Miss Amy!” I hear skateboard wheels on the sidewalk behind me and slow my pace to wait for Jacob, a recent addition to the crew that hangs around my front staircase.

“Jacob! What are you doing riding around here on your skateboard? School just let out a few minutes ago. The bus hasn’t even gotten here yet.”

Jacob picks up his skateboard and walks alongside me as I make my way to the bus stop to pick up Bailey (Bailey is a little girl I watch after school.).

“Yeah. I’m *cough* getting over some cold or something and so I stayed home today.”

“Looks like you’re about over it. Back to school tomorrow?”

Just as he is about to tell me that his little cough is likely to worsen by the next school day, I hear music coming from his back pocket. He pulls out the cutest little blue cell phone and grins while looking at the screen.

“Do you want to see a picture of my cousin’s new dog?” he asks, gesturing towards his phone, “He just got it today.”

“How old is your cousin?”

“Eight”, he answers me while his fingers dance over the keypad with lightening speed.

“So, your cousin, who is eight, just used his own cell phone to text you a picture that he took of his dog?”

“Yeah,” Jacob looks up at me and shakes his brown hair out of his eyes.

“Wow, Jacob.” I have heard of, and even seen, these super connected, tech savvy kids before. There was just something about standing there at the bus stop with an eleven year old boy and looking at pictures of his cousin’s Chihuahua named “Eddie” that made me feel so ancient. It took me a moment to shake the dazed cloud I was in before I could continue.

“Jacob, did you know that when I was your age there was one phone in our whole house?”

“Whoa. Seriously?”

“Yes, Jacob. And even more shocking to you perhaps, may be that the phone was attached to a long cord that kept it hanging on the wall.”

He has now stopped his crazed texting to listen to me creak out my tale of back in the day.

“And also, there was no call waiting. If someone wanted to call us and we were on the phone, get this, they just had to try again later.”

“What?!”

His honest curiosity makes me feel a little older than I meant to when I started my little bit, but I continue on if for no other reason than to educate him. Why did I feel so strongly about educating him? I. don’t. know. It felt like a civic duty.

“Don’t even get me started on voice mail. Did you know that answering machines once used actual cassette tapes? They did.”

The bus came before I could age myself any more. Had that bus been just one minute longer, I could have told him about the days of mixed tapes, boom boxes on shoulders, and friendship bracelets. I didn’t get to teach him about much more beyond the voice mail, but I know I’ll get my hands on a youth who needs to be educated about back in the day.

And so it begins.