I recently visited an old and valued friend whom I have known for more years than I can count. We knew each other when our children were babies and now those babies have children that are heading off to college.
This dear friend emigrated from another country and her still-remaining accent is a delight to all of my children. I have always admired her courage in leaving home for a new country when she was in her twenties, but I learned far more interesting things about her upbringing on this visit. It was then that I realized that it is the small things in one’s past that are often more interesting than the more obvious large events. I heard tales of what it was like to grow up in a village, something far beyond my experience. While I may have accompanied my mother to a market when young, my friend took rides on the milk cart that delivered to the door, smelled the delightful odor of freshly baked bread wafting in from the neighboring shop, and had a best friend that was the daughter of the fish monger.
Her father was a policeman in a department that had only one car. So, he not only walked to work, but walked his beat, as well his days being divided into day shifts and night shifts. Of course, a family car was out of the question. She and her brother spent a childhood trying to remember to be quiet while her father slept during the day.
I heard about the Sunday roast that fed a family of four not only for Sunday lunch, but Sunday dinner as well and then was further used for her favorite meal Monday night when it was chopped up into pieces, mixed with onions, fried and served with gravy.
The point of this is that it is the small things in our background that really set my generation off from that of my grandchildren. I lived without a TV until seventh grade, thought a personal, hand-held phone a science fiction invention, and ate ice cream and drank sodas only in the summer as that was the only time they were available. Most Americans did not travel more than 20 miles from their home and flying in an airplane was for the very few. A typewriter was a new invention, and one looked up anything in a book, usually from the library, unless one’s parents owned an encyclopedia bought, in all likelihood, from a traveling salesman.
One does not have to have conquered the world or written the Great American Novel to be of interest to our offspring. Our childhoods in their small ways are of interest --- maybe to laugh at, maybe to wonder at, or maybe to question. But they should not be presented as better or worse than what the current generation is experiencing. It is simply different and perhaps of some kind of interest because of that.
But then --- life without a cell phone??? Is that really possible?????