I’m having a milestone birthday this weekend. For my
birthday weekend I’m getting a paid trip to Fort Jackson, SC to do Army reserve
training. Hooray! I’m not going to say my age because it’s an obscene number
and this is a family-friendly blog; but from reading this you’ll probably be
able to take a guess. To say that I’m
not where I expected to be in life at this point would be an
understatement. On the other hand, I’ve
seen and done a lot of things in life that I never expected to, many of them
positive things.
The world has changed in a lot of ways since I was
born. When I was in elementary school, they were still showing documentaries in
class on reel-to-reel projectors. I saw “Star
Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” when it was in theaters for the first time. I remember seeing “Raiders of the Lost Ark”
at the movie theater, which got me really hooked on history. I saw it about
fifty times. Growing up, we had a rotary phone in the kitchen and one in my
parent’s bedroom. If you wanted to take
your call into another room, you had to stretch the cord. It didn’t matter much
to me at that age because I almost never talked on the phone. When I was a
teenager, I got to have the crappy old rotary phone in my bedroom, while the
other phones in the house were high-tech push-button phones. There was only one line in the apartment, so
when one phone rang, they all rang. If a
friend called at midnight, the phone rang throughout the house and my mom or
aunt would pick up to find out who the hell was calling at such a late hour.
I remember 8-track players. We had one but almost
never used it. We did, however, use our record player throughout my
childhood. Back then they were called “records,”
not “vinyl.” I don’t care how trendy “vinyl” has become, those things were
****y. One scratch could totally ruin a good record, and if you picked the
record jacket up the wrong way, the record slipped out and shattered on the
floor. I know this because I shattered
quite a few records accidentally as a little kid. Ask my dad, he’ll tell you. Cassettes were better, unless the tape got
jammed in the machine or the motor on the tape-player was slow. Then, all of your music sounded a little
off. There’s nothing like hearing your
favorite song drag or sounding like something from beyond the grave. Only people who lived through the 80’s truly know
the aggravation of trying to carefully extract tape from a machine that decided
to eat it. You’d try not to rip the tape
and then use a pencil to wind the tape after it was out.
However, even with all the drawbacks, I was still
listening to cassette tapes as a teenager, mostly because they were in the
discount bin, and were cheap as hell because of CDs. My brother and I had a few CDs in high
school, but they were expensive, like $15 apiece in the 90’s. I’m a creature of
habit and still listen mostly to CDs, although I do occasionally listen to
satellite radio and live streaming online.
Getting back to the early days, the first TV I used
had a knob and antennas. Whenever you
got tired of watching a channel, you had to get up and turn the knob. You also
had to play with the antennas if the picture was fuzzy or distorted. It was so
annoying. I think we had about five channels. Eventually we caved and got this
newfangled thing called “cable,” which included a couple of new channels like MTV
and Nickelodeon. It even came with a
remote, so we could flip through all 30 channels without leaving the couch.
Whenever Dave (my brother) and I reminisce about the
old days to my nine-year old niece, Summer, she looks at us like we’re talking
about an alien planet. It’s kind of funny, because I remember being her age and
listening to stories from my parents about their childhood and thinking how old
they were and being amazed that human beings could even live for thirty or
forty years. My aunts were about forty at the time. Forty was so old! To me,
that was ancient.
