Realizing that Covid-19 would keep us from traveling to Amsterdam or even San Francisco to celebrate my big birthday last July, my daughter gave me an early gift, StoryWorth. Each week this service emails me a writing prompt, such as the one in the title of this post.
As a child growing up in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, I never flew on a plane until my college years, when I traveled from my home in Queens to school, first in Pittsburgh, and then Boston. My first trip out of the country put me in Saint Croix for my honeymoon in 1972. The thought of having a birthday celebration in Amsterdam or a rowing vacation in Spain, which I was lucky enough to do in 1998 and 1999 would never have occurred to me. Obviously I didn't have a FaceBook account to broadcast my travels to my nearest and dearest.
Binge-watching is a big activity of mine today. As much as it pains me to admit it, I’ve spent hours watching Law and Order (SVU); two Israeli series, Srugim and Shtisel, and many episodes of Bosch, among other favorites. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy binge watching in 1960, when I spent a very memorable week at the Lower East Side home of my grandparents, watching and re-watching The Gay Divorcee with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on daytime network TV.
We listened to music on a turntable during my early childhood, when I quivered in fear listening to my mother playing Tom Sawyer for my older brother. At around age eight, I began buying 45’s, including Rockin Robbin. By the time I turned 12, and the Beatles made their way to New York, I began buying long paying vinyl albums.
As a teenager I mostly listened to a little Motorola transistor radio I’d begged for as a birthday gift. We didn’t even have iPods, so anytime we were in the car, it was Dad’s choice of classical music on WQXR (ugh!). Not until the late 20th century did I own an iPhone which I used for downloading and playing music, among other things. What a relief to control what played in my car via Bluetooth.
Can you believe it wasn’t until the late 20th century that I could play any tune on my iPhone, thanks to Apple Music, and shout at a device called Alexa to play the work of performers I happened to be reading about in The New York Times. Of course, Alexa is an Amazon device, which makes me think back to frequent trips to the public library, where as a 12-year-old I sat there and read books my parents would have banned from our home, including Tropic of Cancer and a marriage manual whose title I no longer remember. The only books I can remember my parents purchasing for me include Nancy Drew and Landmark biographies of Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin FDR.
By the late 20th Century, my daughter and son-in-law gave me a Kindle for my birthday. At first, I paid for each book via a credit card linked to my Amazon account. Shortly after I retired, I realized that if I didn’t mind waiting, I could download books on my Kindle at no charge from the public library.
I could talk about the polio epidemic of the 1950’s as the only thing remotely comparable to Covid-19. While polio inspired fear and anxiety, especially for my mom, who prohibited us from swimming in public pools, it didn’t require us to be locked down in our homes.
As one of my grandchildren, a college freshman here in Boston, recently observed of the social isolation we’re all feeling: “What if Covid-19 happened in the ‘80’s, before we had FaceTime and Zoom?”
The biggest change in my life between my childhood and today is not the number of cars in our household – my parents never had more than one, and besides, my mother didn’t really drive – or the fact that we didn’t have a dishwasher until I was in junior high or a color TV until my freshman year of college.
No kidding, technology has brought changes to my life I would never have imagined. The challenge will be me to keep up with things I cannot imagine today.
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