I marked my 60th birthday this week, which caused me to think of some significant changes of the past half dozen decades.
When I was 15, I had lots of woods in which to run around. I regularly rode a bicycle over most of the county in which I was raised. I thought that was pretty cool, and wasn’t bothered by not having a driver’s license.
Now I’m a member of an organization dedicated to preventing all the corn fields, orchards and forests from disappearing under pavement and tar-paper shingles.
To start the family car, one stepped on a pedal on the floor and pushed a button — even in the Oldsmobile owned by the folks who also owned the wood turning mill in the town where I was raised.
Last week I rented a Nissan Altima, and to fire that sucker up, I stepped on a pedal on the floor and pressed a button.
My parents allowed us to have wine with special dinners. Dad had a Highball most evenings, mom occasionally nipped a bit of sherry, and we kids just understood that if it wasn’t a special occasion — Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter — and we couldn’t finesse Dad out of a sip of his high-powered ginger ale, we didn’t get any.
Now if my son were to give his son a “tetch,” he would go jail and his son would be declared a victim and sent to counseling.
My generation didn’t trust anyone over 30 — mostly, I suspect, because, at 15, one is not consciously aware of anyone actually living that long. My mother was the same age as John Fitzgerald Kennedy when he was elected president. I didn’t understand why she thought that was so significant. (I do, finally, get it.)
Back in the day, when Grandpa paid cash for his Lincoln, one of my favorite sci-fi authors wrote about “credits” that could be assigned to a card you’d carry around in your pocket, and use when you wanted to buy something. In one story, written in the early 1950s, the heroine was tracked by government bad guys who could tap into bank records and know where the young lady was by her purchases.
When I graduated high school in 1965, there were no personal computers. Four years would pass before men walked on the moon, previously thought to have been made of Limburger cheese, and to have been the exclusive domain of one Mighty Mouse.
Students were not allowed to use calculators, out of deference to those who could not afford one. It would be about 15 years before I would be able to purchase a personal computer, with two 400-kilobyte floppy disks and a seven-inch screen that displayed two colors — light green letters on a dark green background.
I now carry on my hip a device that connects to the Internet, browses the web, and sends and receives email, — none of which existed, as far as I knew, in 1965. The device reminds me of my daily appointments, allows me to write notes and news stories and, should I become bored in a doctor’s waiting room, play games until my number comes up.
I am able to hold in the palm of my hand more computing power than launched Apollo 13 — and brought it back — for less than the cost, in 1972 (when I actually bought my first calculator) of a huge device that could add, subtract, multiply and divide, on which someone with far too much time on his hands cleverly figured out the sequence of numbers that, if one were to hold the calculator upside down, would spell out “hELLO.”
My grandchildren have no idea what it means to have spent six decades wandering around this planet. That, I submit, is a good thing.
I’ve noticed that the inventions most worthwhile to humankind have been conjured up by folks too young to realize how much they stand to lose if they fail — and therefore take the kind of risks that need taking to create new computer operating systems, send men and women to the moon and beyond, and create new fuels to power new modes of transportation.
“Times change,” someone said to me this week. “If it changes over the next 20 years like it did the last 20 …”
I’d really like to be here to see how that sentence ends.
© 2007 Readers may contact John Messeder at jmesseder@comcast.net
