Happy New Year
2012 – Somehow when I was a girl, I can recall thinking about the turn of the century from the 1900’s to 2000’s. I felt that it would be strange to be so “old”; as old as I would be in the year 2000. Now it is 2012 and I don’t feel old unless I sit too long in one place or try to get up from the floor.
Things certainly have changed in my lifetime. – When I was a girl we had one phone and it had a dial, you never called anyone who didn’t live nearby because it cost a fortune. If it was really important you could send a telegram. You wrote letters to family and friends and mailed them for .10 cents –air-mail. Regular mail was .04 cents. We did not have TV – we read books, played outside or inside games and listened to the radio.
We went to the movies at the theater that had only one screen and showed two movies for the price of one, plus a newsreel with all the national and world happenings.
We learned to sew so we could have clothes we could not afford to purchase – a new dress for church and a couple of skirts for school. Mom cooked every night until we were in our teens, going out to eat was a luxury for special occasions. I took my lunch to school each day, until I was in Junior High, in a metal lunch box with a thermos that would shatter if it was dropped.
Going to the park to swim or play in the pool was a fun summer time event and we learned to swim and play tennis by taking classes through the parks department. We got our immunizations in mass at school every year or as needed. Some summers we could not go to the pool or the movies because there were polio scares and no one wanted to be exposed to polio. I remember lining up to receive the polio vaccine – there were several places in our town and I think we were at a bank in line with hundreds of others.
We did our math or “arithmetic”, the long way, no calculators, Some learned to use slide rules for chemistry, I never could master that – and it was reflected in my chemistry grades. The homework papers we worked on and turned in were hand written and we all had to learn and use cursive handwriting. Having a typewriter at home did not happen until I was in high school.
The music we listened to was played on record players (turn tables) that held a large record with an arm holding a needle. When I was a teen ’45 records came out although most of the music I listened to was on ’78 records or on the radio.
Our cameras took film and having a camera was a wonderful thing. I got a Kodak Brownie camera when I was 12 or 13. It used 110 film – the trouble was you not only had to buy the film, you had to pay to have the film developed and you never knew if the pictures you took were any good or “came out” until you got the film developed and pictures printed. You might take a whole roll of pictures – 12 shots to a roll – only to find out that something was amiss and you got one or two fairly good pictures or none at all. And they did not charge you less for bad prints so it was an expensive venture.
Yes, things certainly have changed over the last 60+ years that I can recall. Now everyone has a phone with them all the time. No waiting to get that important message. We rarely send letters – instead we e-mail or text each other. Some times, and this is rare for us, we go to a movie – a theater with a choice of 6 to 10 different screens showing different movies - but usually we wait for it to come out on DVD or order it from NetFlix and watch it at home on our big screen TV.
Most of us have some sort of very small music player - an MP3 or Ipod that holds thousands of songs, we can carry it in our pocket and listen to it in the car, at home or through ear phones or ear buds, almost so small you can’t see them. A big change from the transistor radio I got for my 14 birthday that was the size of a laptop today, weighed a great deal more and had an antenna you had to pull out and rotate to get the radio station if you wanted to listen to your music at the beach or on a picnic.
Now, even youngsters know how to use a calculator and can do math problems that I would not have attempted in high school. We all have cameras and most of us also have one on our phone – we can take video also and post our pictures almost instantly on the web to share them with friends and family. And best of all we know right away if we missed our shot and can retake the picture to get it just right. We don’t “print pictures anymore but instead make slide shows and put them or DVD’s or have books printed with our pictures ordered off our computers.
Personal computers are a normal part of most households and used by old and young alike. When I worked at the elementary school and the school system provided me with a computer instead of an electric typewriter, we were so excited because it had 20 MB of disk space. Now days, most computers come with multi gigabytes of disk spaces and even the small thumb drives hold 4 + gig of information. And to add to the mix this Christmas I got a Kindle Fire. This is a reader tablet that I can load books on and take everywhere with me. So my book reading is gradually changing. It surely will be easier to take books with me when we travel or even when I go for appointments.
And let’s not forget GPS devices that not only find where we are going but give us turn by turn directions, tell us how many miles we have to go to our destination, estimate our time of arrival and tell us when we have arrived at our destination.
I feel certain my grandparents would not believe or be comfortable in the world we live in and take for granted each day.
So what other changes will take place in the next ten years? How many of our “new” updated tools will have gone by the way by then. Only time will tell. In the mean time enjoy this new year with “smart phones”, laptop computers, tablets and readers, and cameras with video ready to be posted on the web.
Happy New Year!
