Do You Ever Wish You Could Go Back?

Perhaps it's a result of living so long. Perhaps it's straddling two centuries and many, many decades. But I have seen a lot of changes.

I've seen changes in the landscape. It matters not that I've lived in the same county for over 51 years, I've still seen a lot of changes in the landscape. I've seen busy roads turned into dead ends and new roads stretching out what were dead ends.

I've seen changes in morals and manners and mores. It would take a book to address those!

I've seen changes in fashions; skirt lengths long and short and everything in between. I've seen the end of skirts in many instances and what should never really pass for skirts in others.

But one of the changes I have been thinking a lot about lately are gadgets, gizmos, and machines. If I tried to tell my children about how excited my parents were to get a console television, I would get blank stares in return. Could they really understand the excitement of extensively shopping for and bringing home a huge, mahagony wood, casket shaped, hulking, heavy cabinet filled with a relatively small screen and side speakers with red fabric behind the cabinet cutouts? Zenith, RCA, or Motorola...were there any other choices to be made? I wonder, is there even a Zenith now and doesn't Motorola just make cell phones these days?

And speaking of cell phones, I remember when Grant got his first one. Boy, did it free him up. I could page him (see how advanced we were!) and he didn't have to drive a few miles to find a phone booth, searching for pocket change all the while. It was an ugly brick thing that was actually mounted in the car; but, boy did we ever feel rich and ahead of the times! Speaking of which, where has pocket change gone? It has almost happened, just as predicted; that we seldom use cash anymore. When even McDonalds will take a debit card, why bother?

Is it okay to say that I miss cd's? Yep, they really are fast becoming a thing of the past. Once again, I've lived long enough to outlast the complete life of something that was once the newest and coolest. And yet cd's replaced vinyl. I'm old enough to remember using 45 rpm's with the little plastic insert that you had to put in to get it to play on your record player, which was just a little box that had latched like a suitcase and was stored away in the hall closet when you weren't using it. Our very first records were 78 rpms. The children's records were in bright yellow and green, instead of the grown-up 33 rpm black. Did you giggle, too, if you put in a 33 rpm record and turned the speed up to 78 rpm? Was there ever anything more funny to a 5 year old?

Speaking of having outlasted the complete life of something, I say to you: VHS. The first time that I had ever heard about a VCR was while watching a game show. I think it was probably The Price is Right or Let's Make a Deal. The announcer talked about how you could record your favorite shows and watch them later. Imagine that!!!!! I remember my mother remarking about how happy that would make her to record a musical such as The King and I and be able to watch it whenever she wanted. Well, those first machines were only for the wealthiest. Mass marketing didn't catch on for another eight to ten years. But they did catch on and watching tv changed forever. There was no more need to stay home to watch to see who shot J.R. Just record it and watch it later.

And what about those first video stores? Well? Remember going to some tiny shop with maybe 100 titles to choose from. You learned to find a video shop owner that shared your taste in videos. Along came Blockbuster Video and the corner shop was a thing of the past. Put out to pasture by a bigger bull. Blockbuster had everything and yet you still had to wait for the new releases to be not-so-new to actually rent one. And now Blockbuster has been put out to pasture by a little thing called Red Box and we're back to 100 titles again. Unless, of course, you NetFlix and order ahead or pay per view through cable (again limited selection of titles) or order a movie through your X-box. Who would ever have thought???

Well, every once in a while I miss the old days. Days when I wasn't accessible by cell phone and had to wait for an important call by staying home. Days when it was exciting to put on a record and be-bop around the living room to The Supremes while my parents were gone. (Jimmy Mack, Jimmy, Oh Jimmy Mack. When are you comin' back?) I miss the family gathering around the tv to watch "The Wizard of Oz" because you couldn't just flip in a dvd any old time that you wanted to watch it. (I think I was 10 years old before I knew that part of the movie was in technicolor.) I miss family dinners before Hamburger Helper. I miss waiting for your food to be cooked at the hamburger joint while you sat in the family auto waiting for the car hop to bring you steaming french fries.

Oh, well. What was it I heard lately? Nostalgia; it isn't what it used to be.

Except sometimes it is.

P.S. As if my mind were read by the MSN, here is an article to back me up!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39610178/from/toolbar?GT1=43001