I know I'm dating myself, but I don't care. Most people probably think I'm older than I am anyway. I still remember as a young boy picking up the rotary dial telephone in my grandparents house and intruding on the party line. That's when individual houses didn't have exclusive access to an anonymous dial tone, nor a personal telephone number. You had to ask the operator to connect you to an exchange in order to connect with the person you were trying to call. And there were usually other people on the line. Of course, that quickly evolved into everyone having their own telephone number, the rotary dial phone turned into a push-button device. If you had a push button phone while your friends still had rotary dial, you were thought to be neighborhood royalty.
I also remember, fondly, my Mom playing her big vinyl record albums on the greatest gift my Dad had ever given her - a stereo console with a record player, radio and speakers all in one unit, with enough room to store all of her big albums inside the cabinet. The turntable was constructed so that you could stack several albums on top of one another and they'd continue to drop and play (with a needle) for hours. My Mom always like to do that when she was doing housework. My Mom is most responsible for my eclectic musical interests because she would listen to everything from Johnny Cash to Herb Alpert (big band stuff) to Dionne Warwick. And of course the Chairman of the Board, Mr. Sinatra. If you were of Italian heritage, you had to listen to Sinatra, or you'd have to go to Confession on Saturday afternoon to explain to Father Anthony why you weren't.
My Dad filmed holidays, birthdays and other special occasions with an 8 millimeter movie camera, and colored photography was experimental. Just like the push button telephone, if you had a camera that took color photographs, people bowed at your feet. Television was black and white, and there were very few channels from which to choose. In New Jersey, we had ABC, NBC and CBS, and two New York stations, WPIX and WNEW. Of course, there was also the public television channel so kids could watch Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood.
When someone gave you or sent you a present or a card for your birthday or a special occasion, you wrote to them a thank-you letter on a piece of paper, folded it up, stuffed it into an envelope, wrote out the address, put a stamp on it and mailed it to the other person.
I've been hounded by some writing friends that I needed to be on Facebook in order to promote my books and other projects. So, my 8th grade daughter had to sit down at MY computer and set the whole thing up for me, as well as give me a brief tutorial. Whenever I have questions or challenges with my Facebook stuff, I ask my 8th grader.
Similarly, I was pretty resistant to acquiring a cellular telephone. I didn't see the need. I was happy putting coins into a pay phone if I was not home. When the girls started getting into a variety of school activities and requiring rides and car pools, we gave in and got the girls cell phones, but the threshold was 8th grade. Not before. Of course, the cell phone companies have ways of enticing the whole family to have their own phone, so we all got one. As is usually the case, the girls always seem to get the really nice, top-of-the-line number and the wife and I get stuck with the crappy, buy-one-get-one-free option in order to try to save some money on the proverbial family plan. When I have a cell phone challenge, like how do you take a picture with a phone? Or, how do you download a ringtone, I ask my high school senior.
Most recently, I was encouraged to start an account with Skype. This is a service by which you can have a telephone call, on your computer, with another person, and, through the magic of technology, you can see the other individual, live, while you're speaking to them. Now, of course, this could lead to lots of shenanigans. What if your laptop is sitting open on your bed, and someone rings you up on Skype, and you've just gotten out of the shower and happen to be standing in front of your laptop with nothing on but your birthday suit? Awkward. And who says I want to SEE the person I'm conversing with? I mean, sometimes it's bad enough that you have to answer the darn phone, now you've got to actually look at the person. Why? Anyway, my oldest daughter is way ahead of me with Skype because she's been using it for two years to talk to her college friends when they are home for the summer break. So guess who got my Skype account set up?
Did I tell you that my 8th grader showed me the other day that she can thumb a complete text message, correct spellings and punctuation - blind-folded?
Makes me want to go watch re-runs of I Love Lucy.
P.S. Don't forget to tell your daughter that you love her.
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