Things We Did That Our Children Never Will

The older I get, the more I find myself sitting back and contemplating the past.  I guess this only makes sense, because, the older I get, the more of the past there is to contemplate.  

One of the ways I like to amuse myself in these fits of nostalgia is to think about some of my (ours, if we are of the same generation) life experiences that our children/grandchildren will never experience themselves.  Sure, there are the myriad of personalities, TV shows, sports heroes and entertainers this and future generations will never have the privilege (or pain) of knowing – that list can go on and on -  but, I am talking about the things we did; experiences we personally went through that our kids will never know.  

For example, just think about our relationship with the telephone that will never be realized again.  Our kids will never know the anxiety of trying to find a public phone booth to make a call.  Or, finding one only to discover the handset torn off.  They will never push in the little metal change door looking for left behind coins.  Our kids will never use said phone to make a collect call to our parents, which they will not accept with the understanding that this was the signal to come and pick us up.  Somehow, that became a universal trick shared across the nation – I am sure the telephone company was on to our criminal ways – but, something our kids will never do.  Our children will never have to experience the agony of getting a new phone for each new apartment or home we moved to and waiting in the monopolized phone company’s office for hours waiting for your turn.  Younger people would be surprised to learn that dealing with the phone company in these instances made a trip to the DMV seem like a walk in the park.  

Sure, our kids know what it means to cc someone on an email; and, they may even know that cc stands for “carbon copy”, but, our children will never have to actually handle carbon paper to make a copy.  They will never have the “fun” of replacing a typewriter ribbon or crumbling up a piece of paper and starting over again because of a typo you made on the last line of the page.  They will never experience the exasperation of getting good enough with your typewriter skills to type rapidly without looking at the keyboard only to discover you have been typing long after the paper has already rotated completely through the machine.  They will never know about correction tape or “White Out” and will never understand how neat it is that one of the Monkee’s mother invented it!  

Our children will never discover the affect aluminum foil, a coat hanger, or your younger sibling standing in the right location while touching the antennae has on a TV set’s reception.  They will probably never have to lick the back of a stamp; they may never touch or see a record and will certainly never cut records of a Monkee’s or Partridge Family song off of the back of a cereal box.  Our children will probably never have to clap the dust out of chalkboard erasers or be sent to the principal’s office for hitting another kid on the back with a dirty one.  

Some of the things our children will never experience are certainly for the best.  For example, most of our children will never experience what we went through to have our temperature taken when we were not feeling well, thus developing the fear of the sight of a Vaseline jar.  I hope they never experience the anticipation of seeing what number your birthday was assigned in the yearly draft lottery.  Our children will never be subjected to Madison Avenue glamorizing the act of smoking a particular brand of cigarettes or being asked, “What do you want, good grammar or good taste?”  Our children will never know the horror of seeing a wayward Jart heading their way.  And, hopefully, our children will never know a classmate who wears braces because of polio.  

These are merely but a few of the things we experienced that will forever be a part of history that our children will only learn from books or hear from us.  But, I have typed enough … now it is your turn.  What things do you think back on that our children and our children’s children would laugh at and shake their head in disbelief when we tell them about how life was "back in the day"?  

Of course, there are some things that I thought were permanently a part of the past that have somehow come back in vogue.  For example, there was a time when I thought our children would never again be asked to get the bottle of milk off of the front step in the morning, but, in some places, that door-to-door milk delivery service is making a comeback.  So, I guess you just never know. 

I would love to hear your thoughts; what can you come up with?