Nostalgia, part two. Well, sort of.

 

I have just finished reading an article discussing the very different childhoods of those of us born in the 1940’s and 1950’s to those born and raised when internet and cell phones were common. How we communicated then and how children are managed now incorporates a huge change. Google. Wikipedia. My daughter talks to her phone. Navigating in a car or boat. I could make this list much longer.

Childhood, both for me and for my daughters, was very different from how my granddaughter grew up. We lived in a neighbourhood where most houses had children our age. Something like a 'playdate' would have been met with laughter. We got information from books. My daughters’ treat was a visit to a bookstore with money in hand. In my mind, the big world change happened when my adult daughter and her husband set me up with internet access in 1995. This same daughter had taken a graduate degree in England, had met the husband there and we had planned the wedding through a series (a long and detailed series) of letters posted back and forth across the Atlantic. The other daughter was working in Africa and communicating by letter or telephone. Five years later I had daily access to both of them through email. Now I have virtual meeting with visual and voice. And a steady arrival of photos on my phone, keeping me current with the growth of the step great-grandchild. One of my neighbours read bedtime stories nightly to grandkids in Washington State. Different, for sure.

We are not the first generation to be pulled through into a differently managed world. I recall with amusement my grandmother’s fascination with the stretchy suits (with snap fasteners) my babies wore. She described the pinned wool wrappers that she had used to keep her babies warm, and it did sound dire. Her generation went from horse and buggy to automobile and encountered television. My mother was, I think, twenty-five when my grandparents got electricity, a very late adaptation as they lived on a working farm. My granddaughter had disposable diapers and a voice pickup beside her crib. My daughters had flannelette diapers that were pinned on and washed and dried by the me. But, I did have a programmable washer and drier to use.

I grew up playing chess and checkers and card games. I grew up reading as we did not get a television until I was, I think, thirteen. I grew up with the threat of polio, with almost universal child illnesses of measles, mumps and chicken pox. The vaccines for measles and mumps were available for my children, as was polio vaccine. My children grew up with television and games like Scrabble and Monopoly as well as cards. My step-grandsons grew up with video games.

The article that I read was a discussion of a single serious change. I have been hopping around here and I hope you can follow me at least a bit.

The point I am groping for here is, I think, reasonable. It is this: that, for each person, most change, even a large, a quantum change, is simply accepted and used. In my grandmother’s youth, she travelled by horse and buggy. But as an older adult she did not think of a car ride as anything unusual. Yet something that was as routine for me as a stretchy baby suit was a surprise for her.  For my father, the switch from looking things up in a card file to looking them up on line was extremely difficult. He was not a ten-fingered typist and found using a keyboard slow and frustrating, but was quickly informed by card. My daughters’ and granddaughter’s use of phones for information is simply routine but they still read for pleasure. But, perhaps, for each person there is a change that matters, is meaningful or, sadly, brings loss.

I read. I have a lot of books on bookshelves, more on my iPad, more on e-readers. I do love being able to order a book on line and have it the same day or hour. I recall my days of lugging a pile of books in to the library and lugging a new pile home. Life is different, for sure. For the first  half of my life I wrote letters home at least once a week. And even after internet I continued to do that for my mother.  Who phoned me every Sunday night from the city where they lived. This lasted even after they moved to live close to us. My mother was completely uninterested in computers in any form. 

I have never been able to pin down 'changes' for my mother. Except for polio vaccine. After that was available, I was not sent to stay with my grandparents in the summers when it menaced us all, but children most.