Back to the Future

 

Children love to hear stories of when adults were children themselves. Often the stories are as difficult to believe as imagining that adults were ever children, even when presented with photos as proof.

A neighbor boy who used to watch my dad doing wood carvings in our front yard in summer once asked my dad what TV shows he watched as a kid. My father, who was born in 1921 and was raised in the ’20s and ’30s, replied that they didn’t have TV when he was a child.

Our neighbor, who wasn’t old enough for school at the time, couldn’t imagine what anyone would do without TV.

My father explained that when he was a boy, there were shows on radio like the ones on TV, only without pictures, so everyone could imagine what was going on from the sound. Imagination at that level – or perhaps at all – was probably beyond the boy’s understanding.

I had a similar experience with a student when I worked in schools. Said child couldn’t imagine a TV in black and white with only 3 stations. Worse, there was only one TV in the house. He wanted to know if the cable stations were in color, and was shocked to learn there was no such thing as cable at the time.

“What if everyone wanted to watch something different?”

“My parents had the final say on what the family watched. If you didn’t like it, you could go off and play with your toys. Or that might be your ideal time to do homework.”

Add to the fact that besides the shows being in black and white, the controls were all on the set itself, with no remote. In later years, those of us who were children at that time joked that we were the remote.

It got me thinking about how things have changed just since I was a child. Okay, it’s been a very long time since I was a child – last century, as the kids now like to say.

Many things we take for granted now didn’t exist then.

My parents, both born in the 1920s, were also born at home, not in a hospital. That was something my generation in America found peculiar. Married near the end of the war, they moved into a rural suburb of Philadelphia.

Our neighborhood was relatively newly built as year-round homes when they moved in. Our street ended at the end of our property, the only house on our side of the street. There were a scattering of summer homes on stilts that were only occupied part of the year.

There was a train station within walking distance along a not-pedestrian-friendly main road, which allowed my father access to his job in the city. In bad weather he drove our car to the train station.

The village was more built up by the time I, the third and youngest child, arrived. But there were still farms nearby. The people who lived behind us had a rooster and chickens as well as an outhouse, and there were water pumps scattered throughout the neighborhood for the summer homes.

When I was growing up, we had only one car, just like many of our neighbors. My mother didn’t drive. Thursday night after dinner, we all piled into the car to go to the grocery store to shop for the week. If my mother ran out of anything between shopping trips, she’d send one of us to the local corner grocer, considerably smaller than, and eventually put out of business by 7-11, Wawa and Cumberland Farms. In those days, a parent could send their child to the store for a pack of cigarettes, and no one thought a thing of it.

The milkman – and it was a man – delivered milk to the house, the dry cleaner came to the house to deliver dry cleaning and pick up the next week’s items, Charles Chips trucks stopped at their customers’ houses to sell tins of pretzels and potato chips – the only kind of chips anyone knew about at that time – and Freihoffers’ bread had a truck  that came around to sell the variety of types of bread they made. (I never heard of bagels as a small child, and didn't actually eat one until I was well into adulthood.)  There was also a traveling huckster who sold fruits and vegetables around the town. So, the many women without cars, many of whom didn’t have drivers’ licenses, having moved from the city, where trains, trolleys and buses were plentiful, didn’t have to worry about feeding their families or getting their husbands’ suits cleaned.

Amazon, along with several grocery store chains, now has a food delivery service.

But emergencies were something else.

In those days, 9-1-1 didn’t exist. Indeed, when I was a child, some people still had party lines instead of a private phone line while the telephone company built the post-war wiring and capability to give every home its own number.

But doctors made house calls. A mom without a car would have to rely on neighbors and friends with a car at the house to take them and their child to the hospital in case of serious injury. Most  people would only call an ambulance if someone were dying.

Our cuts and scrapes were treated with Merthiolate or Mercurichrome – as the names imply, containing mercury – and a bandage. We were then patted on the head and sent back outside to play. We were often told, if we came in injured, to stop crying, we weren’t dying.

Cuts and scrapes weren’t given more thought than to clean them up, stop any bleeding, and put a Band-Aid on it. This was especially true for adults.

One Saturday, my mother was playing badminton with my dad and my brothers – I wasn’t old enough to be included. It had rained the day before, so parts of the yard were muddy. She’d also been raking earlier, and the rake was still out, leaning against a tree. While playing, she slid on some mud and fell on the rake, gouging her leg.

She stopped to clean the mud off her leg, wash it and put antiseptic on the wound, followed by a bandage before she went back to the badminton game. A stupid accident, but nothing to make an issue of. No thought was given to getting a puncture wound from a muddy rake with heaven knew what mixed in. She had thoroughly washed the wound with soap and water, and it was bandaged, so she’d done what she was supposed to, as far as she knew.

In the days before synthetic drugs, the tetanus shot was made from horse blood. My mother was allergic to horses, so didn’t get tetanus shots. Now she had to get the shot before she died – early signs of lockjaw had begun – and to suffer the allergic reactions long enough for the shot to take effect before she could get any treatment for the allergic reaction. My mother was lucky to have survived.

Accidents that can now be avoided by the proper protective gear were common. Everyday things presented potential injuries beyond the lead paint on baby furniture.

One day I was telling a child I knew about how I broke my nose in the car at six. I was sitting in the back passenger side seat of a two-door car. My father had just dropped my brother off at Little League. My brother had been sitting in the front seat, but now it was empty. As my father approached the intersection, the light turned yellow. When he realized he wouldn’t make the light, he slammed on the brakes. I served as the crash test dummy, hurtling forward as the front seat back collapsed forward. And I landed nose first on the metal dashboard.

The wonderful 21^st century child I was telling about this wanted to know if I had my seatbelt fastened. I explained that in 1961, the only place seatbelts existed were in airplanes, unless it was an option for the very expensive luxury cars of the wealthy. Ours wasn’t even a new car. Nor were there locking seat backs in two-door cars. Or padded dashboards. I was lucky we were on a 35 mph road or I might have been thrown through the windshield. Alas, my pug nose turned into something I haven’t liked since.

Some of our toys wouldn’t pass muster now, either. I had a device called a Vac-u-form. It consisted of a rectangular metal base. The top was divided in half. On one side was a platform where plastic molds were placed; on the other side, was a heating plate. Above the heading plate was a flip arm where plastic squares were secured above the heating plate. The heat of this machine was similar to a burner on the stove. It would have cooked cakes much faster than the Easy Bake Oven that was popular at the time. But it wasn’t for baking. Instead a plastic square was heated above it for about three minutes, then flipped over onto the mold. At the same time a handle was pumped to create a vacuum, and suck the plastic into the shape of the mold. Then, after a few minutes’ wait, the plastic form could be removed and cut out. There were molds of boats, half ½” balls that were glued together to form a whole ball, and a variety of designs that could be made into decorative pins.

The directions to this item included a statement that an adult should supervise any child using this, but by the time I was 10, I was considered intelligent enough to use it unsupervised – although there was always an adult in calling distance. Other than a few melted plastics that weren’t mounted correctly and a couple of burns on fingers, nothing bad ever happened to me when using it. But it was taken off the market not long after it was introduced. I never knew anyone else who had one. Thinking about it now, this could probably be considered a ’60s forerunner of the 3-D printer.

Our unsafe world taught us that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Still, we of the generation of Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Flintstones and the Jetsons had plenty of room for imagination. Now, finally, the robot maids promised by the year 2000 might soon be in a mail-order store near you. 

 

A Time of Outrage

 

Some people look for reasons to be outraged or insulted.

I don’t know how many other people have this issue, but often when I’m on social media, I forget the fact that everyone in the room, drunk, sober, class bully, village idiot (by that I mean people who intentionally try to appear stupid), the uninformed, those looking to pick a fight, as well as your friends can see what you’ve written.

A simple comment about a television program or some celebrity meant to harm no one ends up being attacked by people you wouldn’t even want to meet in real life. Often those attacks contain rather coarse expletives – the sort you used to be banned from using on social media – for no other reason than the person disagrees with your opinion.

And that is the key word: Opinion. Most of what is posted online is nothing more than opinion. And for that, we are subjected to name-calling.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called a snowflake for having a conscience. Fine. You know, avalanches are made up of snowflakes. And that statement is often my response to being called a snowflake, if I even bother to respond.

Often, I don’t deem the bullies worthy of a response. If they’re being particularly aggressive, I block them as well as not responding.

Not long ago, I responded to something posted online and several people’s responses showed that they had either not read what I wrote or not understood the way I wrote it. I suppose sometimes my sentence structure is too advanced for those who are looking for an argument, and they jump on what they think they saw. It kind of reminds me of Charlie Brown playing football with Lucy.

I’m no more a genius than anyone else. I’m just your average person trying to get by in the world. I have nothing going for me that could, in any way, make me influential. The only awards I ever received – other than a couple of fencing medals – were for perfect attendance, and I was even criticized by my peers for those.

I would say my biggest error online is when I get into a conversation with a friend on a post, whether it’s mine, theirs or someone else’s, and I forget that everyone else out there can see what I’ve written. Then someone else comes in and makes a comment on what I’ve said, usually in a negative way. My first thought it, “Mind your own business; I wasn’t talking to you!” And then I realize, oh, yeah, I did post that in a public forum, and anyone can nose in.

I often get into the mindset that, especially if it’s my own post, it’s like being at a cocktail party. You may be in a room with lots of people, but you’re not talking to all of them. You’re talking with a circle who are standing around you, and if someone from across the room comes over and butts in – especially if they don’t have a history with you on the subject – you feel annoyed, to say the least.

Unfortunately, social media is not a cocktail party, and everyone in the room has a microphone.

What I really find obnoxious, though, is when you ask a question about a post, and someone feels the need to put you down for what you’ve posted.

I see social media as an opportunity to learn things on a social level. It’s certainly not an educational forum, but if you look at it like “The Kelly Clarkson Show” or “Evening Magazine” (is that even still on?) it’s the online version of “entertainment news.”

For example, someone posted about the Eurovision contest. I know what that is, but I was unaware of what countries can participate – or even if it’s restricted to certain countries. The post was about one country not participating if a certain other country – a non-European country, in fact – participated. Not knowing what countries participate (I know the US doesn’t, but I don’t know whether or not we’re allowed to), I asked if countries outside Europe were allowed to participate. One person replied that Australia does. That was fine. But the next comment was simply rude. The person said, “Maybe you shouldn’t comment on things you know nothing about.”

I don’t know why that person couldn’t have just scrolled on by. But I replied, “I didn’t comment. I asked a question. Generally people ask questions to learn something, which was what I was trying to do.”

I didn’t grow up watching the Eurovision contest. They don’t play it here. What was wrong with my question? It never got answered, so I still don’t know. But I won’t bother asking on social media.

My real pet peeve on social media is the group of people who just look to be affronted. They see the slightest comment as an attack on them personally. If you talk about educational standards going down, they attack you for calling them stupid. (Hey, first of all, I wasn’t talking to you. Second, I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about the state of education at this moment in history. Get a grip! – of course, I never say that.)

If you express a dislike of a particular actor, you get a diatribe about how stupid you are because you don’t love what they love. I’ve learned to couch my dislike of actors, singers and others in the performing arts as “not my cuppa.” Many of the attackers apparently don’t know what that means, so they give it a pass.

Reggae isn’t my cuppa. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think anyone should like it. (I’m waiting for those who will misinterpret that sentence because they don’t understand the sentence structure) Like away. Be happy. I’m not saying it’s not music, or that it’s not worthy of fans. I’m only saying I’m not on that fan list. As the song said, “Different strokes for different folks.”

I was teased practically to the point of torture when I was a teen for saying I liked the Monkees and the Bee Gees. After that I kept that information to myself based on prior criticism. Now that there’s only one member of each band left alive, it’s almost cool to be a fan. (So does my cool factor improve if I divulge that I have nearly all of the albums for both bands, mostly on vinyl?)

I used to spend a good deal of time on Social media, probably more than is good for me. I think I’m over it. I now check out whether or not anyone’s messaged me, looked to see if anyone I know has commented on anything I’ve posted, scroll around to see if any of the fun things are there – I have a fondness for videos of Casper the dog, who gives his “father” explanasions  of things, and of course, wants treats – and then I sign off. After all, I have books to write.

I used to love ceiling cat, but I don’t know whatever happened to him, or many other fun pages. I hate the political horror pages, but I do look to see what the comments are occasionally. I’ll even go so far as to type a comment, then leave the page without posting it because I don’t like the negativity.

I think one of my New Year’s Resolutions should be something one of my cousins said about social media several years ago. She said she doesn’t check what anyone she doesn’t know has to say on her posts because it’s none of her business.

                                                                    #  #  #

New service: grammar refresher. This month's words: Then/than

then: a time reference. E.g. :She won the race, then received the medal.

than: comparison. E.g.: The giant is taller than the bunny.

 

 

Memoir of a Scatter-Brained Four-Year-Old

 

I had a collection of invisible friends. I never told anyone I had them or talked to them out loud. Our conversations went on in my head. 

My mother used to say she wished she knew what was going on in my head. I didn’t tell her since, even at four I knew that only crazy people talked to people who weren’t there, and if you were crazy, men in the white coats would put you in a straitjacket and take you to Byberry. I wasn’t sure where that was, but I knew I didn’t want to go there.

My mother said she didn’t want them to come for her until the azaleas were in bloom. I used to hope they’d never bloom so no one would take her. I never knew why she’d want them to take her. 

Who could understand grownups?

My mother had silly rules, like looking up and down before crossing the street. 

What about cars? 

On our street there were seldom cars except just before dinner when dads came home. No one crossed the street then; you were in the house not spoiling your appetite.

What about the big road? There were always cars on that. Still, I dutifully looked at the sky and then at the ground, peeking out the corners of my eyes for cars.

I never asked why I needed to look up and down for two important reasons: first, my brother would say I was stupid; second, I knew the answer my mother would give. “Because I’m your mother and I said so.” Even at four I knew that was the answer to most questions beginning with why.

It was different in the city. There, when the white rectangle word lit up it meant you could cross the street and cars knew not to hit you. When the orange square word lit up, it meant they didn’t.

I loved going downtown. We took the train. I knew we were almost there when my brothers pointed out the window at the sky and said, “Look, there’s Billy Penn,” but for some reason I thought they said penguin. 

I didn’t know who Billy the Penguin was, but I pointed at the sky and pretended I could see him, too. I thought maybe he was like Bertie the Bunyip and lived in the television.

I knew my address and phone number, even if I didn’t know what addresses and phone numbers were. In case I was ever lost, I could go right up to the nearest policeman – or the lady behind the counter if I were in Wannamaker’s – and tell them my name, address and phone number so my parents could find me.

My parents did so many things I didn’t understand; it’s amazing I ever understood anything. My mother would decide to tell me things I didn’t ask about. 

She didn’t need to tell me about monsters because it never occurred to me that they could live under the bed or in the closet – until she mentioned that they didn’t. 

I knew they lived inside the television, just like Beaver Cleaver, Opie Taylor, Bertie the Bunyip and the cowboys and Indians.

 Too many dead cowboys and Indians was the reason our television would break, according to my dad, and he’d go behind the console and clean them out.

Anyway, when I was four I guess my aunt was having another baby – she did that often – and my mother decided to tell me where babies came from. I hadn’t asked. It didn’t occur to me to wonder. Babies just were, although I didn’t know how grownups actually knew when they were going to get one. I guess my mother knew and had to tell someone, so she told me.

The whole thing didn’t sound right, in my opinion. She started off telling me that the dad had the seeds. Wait, what? 

She lost me right there. 

I knew about seeds. They came in little paper packets that you bought at the store and planted in a garden. Then you’d get flowers or carrots or something. I had been to my aunt’s house. She had flowers in her garden, not babies.

Somehow this had to make sense. Okay, so they buy baby seeds. They plant them in a planter that’s hidden in their room. That’s why we weren’t allowed in my parents’ room without permission: they didn’t want us to know too much about the plants.

Anyway, something grew – probably something yucky, like spinach – the mom would eat it and it made her get fat. I was four, after all, and had observed that only fat ladies had babies. 

When the mother was fat enough she went into the hospital, and they put her on a diet. When she lost enough weight her prize was to go to the nursery and pick out which baby she wanted. It sounded silly to me, but it was a grownup thing.

Where did the babies come from? Well, there were always babies in the hospital nursery, just as there were always groceries in the grocery store. I guess some people need more detail than that, so I thought up the most logical solution (Whatever my mother said certainly made no sense – but again, “because I’m your mother and I said so,” was the reason behind it, so I didn’t ask).

I knew at that time that God made all of us. 

And where are things made? In factories. There were car factories, bicycle factories, refrigerator factories – there must be baby factories, too. 

God would make the babies and send them down the checkout line. 

People would pack them in boxes – the kind with the little holes in the sides and a handle top. The boxes were put in a delivery truck. 

The truck delivered the babies to the hospital according to how many boys and girls and which colors of each they had ordered. 

Then the nurses took them out of the boxes and put them in the plastic bins in the nursery until someone picked them.

I don’t know what my mother may have said about babies. This was what I put together after she mentioned the seeds. It made about as much sense to me as anything else grownups did, and I figured it out by myself, without anyone telling me I was stupid.

If I told Rob about this he’d know I was smart, I thought. I didn’t know if I was as ugly as he said, but I knew I wasn’t stupid. I never did tell him though, because I thought he might not play with me if he knew I wasn’t stupid.

With this knowledge, I was well on my way. Someday I’d know how to read and then maybe I would drive across the bridge over the ocean and see that Iron Curtain the grownups were always talking about, and the little red people in Russia. Who knew? There might be lots of other things to discover.