At my age, the concept of a generation gap becomes very evident. My grandchildren have no idea what a rotary phone is. The same goes for the typewriter and other such technology marvels that I grew up with. Gone are the 78 and 33 1/3, as well as the smaller 45 r.p.m. records played with the record player.
A special order is now required to get the factory to produce a standard shift car. I remember my dad’s old VW Beetle did not have a synchronized first gear. You either had to double clutch or make the car come to a complete stop to be able to downshift to first. I also recall large cargo vans and trucks without synchronized transmissions, where the driver had to double clutch between every gear either up or down. A lot of gear meshing noises were made by novice drivers!
Today’s music and lyrics are also a far cry from what I grew up with. I can’t get my head wrapped around the rap genre, which is usually performed by males with oversized pants worn halfway down on their buttocks, making plumbers look decent! Older songs are often used in TV commercials these days, especially those ads that target my generation. For example, the song Good Morning, Good Morning was used in an advertisement for Viagra. Our granddaughter, being about 16 years old, had never heard the song until she heard it played during the Viagra commercial. Our daughter and her children showed up early one morning at our old farm. My way of greeting them was to sing (off-key, of course), Good Morning, Good Morning, which made our granddaughter turn to her mother and, in a disgusted voice, say, “I don’t want to know about my grandparents’ sex life! That’s totally disgusting!”
My twin brother and I were born before disposable diapers, bikinis, plastic bottles, television, penicillin, artificial hips, frozen food, photocopiers, contact lenses, Rubik’s Cube, cars with automatic transmissions, and jet airplanes. We grew up before credit cards, birth control pills, laser beams, pantyhose, dishwashers, clothes dryers, electric blankets, air conditioners, and dry cleaners. We were born before man walked on the moon.
Our generation was so quaint that we got married first and then we lived together. Closets were for clothes, not for ‘coming out’ of.Meaningful relationships meant getting along with our siblings, parents, and all the other extended family members. Bunnies were not centrefolds in men’s magazines; they were small rabbits, and a rabbit was not a Volkswagen, and hooters were owls. There were no such things as house-husbands, dating services, nor group therapy or nursing homes, and FM radio was not even a concept. We never heard of tape decks, DVDs, videos, digital cameras, remote controls, electric guitars, pump action water guns, yogurt or guys wearing face jewelry. A chip was a piece of wood, hardware was hand tools, and software wasn’t even a word.
Any item marked “Made in Japan” was junk and the term ‘making out’ referred to how well one did on an exam. Pizza, hamburgers, French fries and instant coffee did not exist. The difference between the sexes was already discovered by Adam and Eve, and we never heard of sex change operations; we made do with how we were made. And we were the last generation that was so ignorant thinking you needed a husband to have a baby.
After discussing the foregoing with my 24-year-old grandson, he made the following observation: “You grew up in a different world, grandpa. Actually, it was an almost primitive one! My generation grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, orbiting space stations, a space probe on Mars, drones, laser technology, computers with Wi-Fi and colour printers. Today’s technology allows doctors to do organ transplants, as well as artificial joints. The Internet has come to be in our generation, and is accessible by cellular phones. Electric cars are now seen on the roads and highways, and there is even a car-airplane combination that has just been developed, and robots are now available for domestic work.”
I looked him square in the eyes and said, “You’re right, Willis, we didn’t have any of those things when I grew up, so the scientists in my generation invented most of them! Your generation will expand on today’s technology, making the future even better or scarier!”
Our son suggested that I should start some home weight exercises to maintain muscle mass in my upper body. He suggested that I take one five-pound potato bag in each hand and raise my arms to shoulder level. Try and get up to five lifts, he said, and then slowly increase until you get to 10 lifts. I’ve been doing that for a month now and I finally made the 10. I was really proud of myself and kept bragging to Marion. Then my son came by to check on my weight training and saw that the bags were empty, so he added one large potato to each bag! Can you believe it?!
An old friend of mine who is a little bit older than me was on the operating table awaiting surgery, and he insisted that his son-in-law, a renowned surgeon, perform the operation. As he was about to get the anesthesia, he asked to speak to his son-in-law and said, “Don’t be nervous, do your best and just remember, if the operation doesn't go well and something happens to me, then your mother-in-law is going to come and live with you and your wife." The operation was a success!
