Life Is Easy Now

Remember When. . .

I heard all about my parents walking to school through the snow. At least they didn’t claim it was twenty miles uphill each way. Personally, I rode the noisy school bus for an hour, each way, everyday, so I had it better. Now the kids have their own car or at least Mom or Dad running shuttle service. With each generation life gets easier. At least that is the way it is designed to be. Not to say that each generation does not have new issues, just different. Sometimes we forget how easy we have it now.

Maybe you really have it rough and have to ride your 21 speed mountain bike to school. Try doing those Colorado mountain hilly roads on total pedal power; you go only go as fast as you can pedal and no gears at all. We laugh about feeling so sorry for those who only have a 10 or 15 speed bike instead of a 21 speed. The seats are far more comfortable now too. Bike shorts? Forty years ago those cushy shorts were not even a glimmer in the merchandising eye. Sometimes we forget how easy we have it now.

The ipod you can’t leave home without which is glued to your body like another appendage was not available ten or 15 years ago. Carrying the family radio on your bike or shoulder would not work well. Remember when we carried huge “boom boxes?” Now you carry your entire music library in your pocket. We forget how easy we have it now.

Cell phones? Some of us grew up with crank phones. Yeah, I was a long short and a long through early grade school. Moving up to a rotary dial phone was an upgrade. Cordless phones, not a chance. We had to sit right there by the phone to talk. We fuss about privacy now. That old crank, rotary or even the early push button phones were party lines; zero privacy for the calls. We forget how easy we have it now.

“Reach out and touch someone” actually meant making an effort. Using the voice recognition dialing on your cell phone does not take much effort. Automatic programming of the phone number in the phone? Give me a break. We had to actually remember the number or carry a little paper book with the numbers.

Multiplication, long division and addition were actually functions of the mind. Kids have the computer or calculators to do it all for them. We actually had to use our head to compute math problems. Imagine that, thinking. Computers did not exist for us and we whine if you do not have the latest high speed, lightweight, high resolution graphics laptop. We forget how easy we have it now.

Imagine having to look at a set of encyclopedias or search through the Dewey Decimal System in the library in the quest for the right reference book for your term paper. If you were lucky, the book you needed had not been checked out by someone else who did not have to return it until after your paper was due. Now we look it up on Google with the touch of a key or the click of the mouse.

Preparing the papers by writing them out by hand or typing them on a ribbon typewriter was another treat which modern kids have never experienced. The ribbon got tangled or the keys jammed together and you had ink all over your fingers. Yes, each letter was on a separate metal arm which flew up and struck the ribbon. When you hit 2 or 3 keys at once they all flew up together and jammed. We had to separate them with our fingers resulting in ink all over our fingers.

Oh the joy of having the ribbon run out in the middle of typing the paper and it was too late to get to the store to buy another ribbon. Not only that but the teacher expected the paper to be neat and not have forty million strikeovers, misspelled words or ink blotches.

Want more than one copy; we had the joy of carbon paper. When we typed the wrong letter, we had to go back and correct each sheet. Want to move a paragraph, start all over typing that page. We forget how easy we have it today.

WE have spell check loaded on our computer and even a thesaurus at the touch of our keypad. We don’t even have to know how to spell or use a dictionary. We forget how easy we have it these days.

No matter what happens with the economy, political leaders or minor inconveniences, remembering how easy we have it today in comparison to the past puts a new perspective on life.

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