One of the real challenges that faces one in the eighth decade of life is change. There is good change, bad change, and just plain change depending on one’s views and proclivities. And here we face one of the other realities of being older --- ‘the good old days.’ When I reached adulthood years ago the only options open to me were to be a nurse, a secretary or a teacher until I could manage to get myself married and become June Cleaver cooking dinner every night in high heels and pearls.
I thought about this the other day as I watched a program on the disappearance of newspapers as we have known them. Those black and white disseminations of the news were a firm fact of my childhood. There was my grandfather, hidden behind that paper in the morning his hand reaching out periodically to get a sip from his coffee cup. At my house, in the Washington, DC area, there was the morning paper, The Washington Post, and the afternoon paper, The Washington Star, for the news that had accumulated during the day. I remember when the Star bit the dust only because the Post took up its cartoon page giving me four glorious pages of comics each day. There was much consternation at the time over the demise of the Star but we all survived. Articles from those papers were discussed around the dinner table and while I did not take part I was made aware that there was a wide world out there in which important things were happening.
I will digress here for a moment and mention an article I read that commented that if the car had not been invented, New York City would have been knee deep in horse droppings and if the telephone had not developed beyond women at a switchboard handling calls, every other woman in the country would have been a telephone operator.
No one foresaw the car or the cellphone, but they were coming disrupting the ‘good old days’ with a new way of doing things. It was change. And from this remove it looks good but at the time was fought against by some.
I do not know the solution to the newspapers or much else, but my job is to wake up each day grateful and try not to be too mad when that darn computer does not do what I want it to.