The Good Old Days
A young girl wrote the following on a Twitter post:
“I have all the information at the tips of my fingers and I just watched elephants walking through the jungle in Africa, so tell me how great it was to drink water out of a hose, boomer.”
I laughed at that.
She has a point, but she’s missing out too. I’m not quite sure having all the information in all the world has helped much.
There’s a whole lot that I feel nostalgic about.
Like drinking water from the hose, and hearing my Dad call for us to all come in the house because “that’s enough.”
And it’s true, we’d get home from school on a warm day and leave the house. We’d play ball in our yard or other yards or we’d run into the woods and swing on a grape vine.
My kids have never swung on a grape vine.
We’d walk through a creek and look for salamanders. It’s not quite like watching elephants on a cell phone screen.
There wasn’t the wealth of information at our fingertips, that’s for sure. We had to look it up in an encyclopedia or we’d head to the library and go through the microfilm. God, that sucked, but we’d write our papers by reading and putting it all together.
We’d set up kickball games, baseball games, driveway hockey and all kinds of hoop games. We shot baskets making up all sorts of ways to score it.
Drive through your town now and look for the kids playing outside on a warm day...
...you won’t find them...
...they’re inside watching elephants.
Remember collect calls?
Paying for long distance calls?
I used to call home and the operator would tell my Dad, “I have a collect call from Cliff.”
My Dad would always have a funny response:
“I threw that bastard out a month ago. I don’t want to talk to him.”
Then he’d call me back at the phone number assigned to my college hall.
We used to play cards and backgammon. I played a game of backgammon over the weekend...
...there was a younger guy there.
He’d never seen the game played before.
We’d play gin rummy and crazy 8’s. I played thousands of card games with my Dad and brothers and sisters and all of our neighborhood friends.
We’d laugh and make fun of each other.
Now kids play games without even being in the same state.
They never see each other!
We had endless games monopoly games and games of Risk that would go on for days...
...we’d have a crossword puzzle going and whoever was around would work on it...
...until we finished it together.
I love having information at my fingertips too. I remember having to wait two days to get a score of a Yankees game on the west coast.
Now a guy hits a homer and I get an alert.
That’s good.
Thing is, there’s a trade-off. For all the information we have, there’s a price to be paid.
You tell me...
...what is better?
Watching elephants in the jungle...
...or drinking water from the garden hose?
“I have all the information at the tips of my fingers and I just watched elephants walking through the jungle in Africa, so tell me how great it was to drink water out of a hose, boomer.”
I laughed at that.
She has a point, but she’s missing out too. I’m not quite sure having all the information in all the world has helped much.
There’s a whole lot that I feel nostalgic about.
Like drinking water from the hose, and hearing my Dad call for us to all come in the house because “that’s enough.”
And it’s true, we’d get home from school on a warm day and leave the house. We’d play ball in our yard or other yards or we’d run into the woods and swing on a grape vine.
My kids have never swung on a grape vine.
We’d walk through a creek and look for salamanders. It’s not quite like watching elephants on a cell phone screen.
There wasn’t the wealth of information at our fingertips, that’s for sure. We had to look it up in an encyclopedia or we’d head to the library and go through the microfilm. God, that sucked, but we’d write our papers by reading and putting it all together.
We’d set up kickball games, baseball games, driveway hockey and all kinds of hoop games. We shot baskets making up all sorts of ways to score it.
Drive through your town now and look for the kids playing outside on a warm day...
...you won’t find them...
...they’re inside watching elephants.
Remember collect calls?
Paying for long distance calls?
I used to call home and the operator would tell my Dad, “I have a collect call from Cliff.”
My Dad would always have a funny response:
“I threw that bastard out a month ago. I don’t want to talk to him.”
Then he’d call me back at the phone number assigned to my college hall.
We used to play cards and backgammon. I played a game of backgammon over the weekend...
...there was a younger guy there.
He’d never seen the game played before.
We’d play gin rummy and crazy 8’s. I played thousands of card games with my Dad and brothers and sisters and all of our neighborhood friends.
We’d laugh and make fun of each other.
Now kids play games without even being in the same state.
They never see each other!
We had endless games monopoly games and games of Risk that would go on for days...
...we’d have a crossword puzzle going and whoever was around would work on it...
...until we finished it together.
I love having information at my fingertips too. I remember having to wait two days to get a score of a Yankees game on the west coast.
Now a guy hits a homer and I get an alert.
That’s good.
Thing is, there’s a trade-off. For all the information we have, there’s a price to be paid.
You tell me...
...what is better?
Watching elephants in the jungle...
...or drinking water from the garden hose?
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