When I was a little girl we would go to South Dakota every couple of years to visit my Grandma and cousins. I sometimes wonder how we made that long trip in a car without air conditioning. My favorite thing to do before the trip was to sit at the table with my dad and look at the map. We didn’t have a book with the maps of all the different states in one place. Instead we had a road map for each state that we would be going through on the way. He would sit with me at the table and he would let me mark the map with our route, telling me which towns we would probably stop at along the way to spend the night. Once we had marked our map to the border of one state, we would fold it up and take out another and mark that state’s route. Since we were starting in Texas, we would use the Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota maps. Usually we stopped in Salina, KS to spend the night. I remember this because my brother Garry would make the same silly joke every year. Can’t remember it exactly but it was something about how the town came to be named and involved an Italian guy exclaiming “ it’s a line a “ when asked what he had drawn on a piece of paper.
Jimmy sang even then so our road trips were filled with songs. Always a rousing version of "home on the range" when we went through the National Park in S.D. where the buffalo actually did roam. We would pay my little sister Connie a nickel or a dime (big money back then) to say she needed to stop and use the bathroom even when she didn't because she was the only one my dad would stop for. The rest of us were told we could "hold it". I loved stopping at Stuckeys which always prompted an argument on whether it was pronounced Stuck ees or Stew kees. We would always buy a bag of salt water taffy and that would keep us occupied for a while. I remember one year I had a tootsie roll pop and the commercial was running about how many licks it took to get to the center of the tootsie roll pop. I was determined to find out. By the time we reached S.D. my tongue was swollen...can't remember the answer now...but it was a lot!
One year we took an extended vacation and went to Yellowstone Park as part of our vacation. So in addition, to the usual maps that my dad brought home for me to mark our route, I got to mark a Wyoming and a Montana map and a Colorada and New Mexico map as our return trip took a different route. I loved being the keeper of the map. I loved that my brothers and parents relied on me to tell them what the next town coming up was and I loved adding up the miles between the dot. I remember once we went through a town in Wyoming that wasn’t on the map so I wrote it in. When we came into the town there was a big sign that said “City limits of Bill, Wyoming.” Population 1. We stopped at the little gas station as we drove into the town. We went inside. There on the wall was a big sign that said Welcome to Bill, Wyoming. Mayor Bill, Police Chief, Bill, Fire Chief, Bill Storeowner, Bill Mechanic, Bill. We were waited on by Bill. When we drove out of town, there was a sign saying you are leaving Bill, Wyoming. Drive carefully, the life you save might be Bill’s. I remember thinking that was the funniest thing I had ever seen. For weeks my brothers and I would recite the signs.
It would be interesting to know how badly the sale of paper maps and atlas’s has plummeted since GPS has become so commonplace. Almost everyone I know either has a GPS in their car or on their phone. you can type in the name of a street in a city and your starting location and instantly have not only the directions but a calculation of the time it will take to drive it. Kids nowadays, if asked to help a parent plan a vacation would probably not go get out their box of map pencils like I did. They’d log onto their computer and printout the route and go back to whatever video game they are currently obsessed with. Kinda sad, really. Technology has made it unnecessary to know north, south, east and west. You just do what the voice on the dash says. I wonder if the younger generation would even know how to read one of the old road maps…what the number between the dots meant.
And roadmaps being replaced by GPS systems are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to changes. When I was a little girl, my mom used to play library with me and my brothers. We would dig out all our books and put them out in the living room in various places. We would cut envelopes in half and tape them into the front of our books to serve as the pocket for the check out card. We would get index cards and write the name of the book on the card and put it into the pocket. We would find a cardboard box and cut a slot in it to make it our return box for books. We would get an ink pad and a stamper and set up the librarians desk. We would get one of our old school photos and tape it to an index card with all our information and that was our library card. Then when all was set up, we would play library. We would go into the living room (our library) browse the books, choose one and take it to the desk where we would show our card to the librarian and she would pull out the card from inside and stamp it. Then put it into a file box. When we returned our book she would pull the card, put it back in the book and re-stock the shelf. We would do this for what seemed hours. The best part was my mom would always have a story hour, just like they do at the real library and we would sit in a semi-circle at her feet as she read to us. Such precious memories.
Today, if you tried to play Library exactly as I have described above the poor kid wouldn’t have a clue what you were doing. You would have to completely alter the game and use a bar code and a scanner and a computer to make it realistic.
Another game we played was grocery store. We would use monopoly money and poker chips as change. We would pull all our canned goods and things out of the cabinet. We would make coupons on index cards for some of the items. We had an old adding machine that we used as our cash register. We would tape price tags to the items and when you took them to the checkout, we would add up each item on the adding machine and present the total. This was how I learned how to make change. My mom would have us count back the change. A lot of kids nowadays probably couldn’t make change. They are used to the cash register telling them how much change to give back. I was at a Wendy’s restaurant a couple of years ago and they had a power glitch and their cash registers weren’t working. The line slowed to a halt. Not only were the teenage workers having trouble with the concept of writing down the order (instead of punching french-fry on the key pad) but the manager was having to add up the total on an old fashioned calculator and calculate the tax and write the total on the ticket. Simple enough except that while I watched not a single worker (other than the manager) knew what to give the customer back in change if for example their tab was 5.01 and the customer handed them a $10.00. It was sad really to see that without a machine telling them to give the customer back $4.99 they couldn’t figure it out.
I remember that even when we were at our poorest when I was a kid, that my parents found a way to scrape together and buy us a set of World Book Encyclopedias. My brothers and I would do all our reports for class out of the information gathered from those books. We also used them to make road bumps for our matchbox cars by putting them underneath the rugs. That was before carpet was commonplace.
Oh, for the old days. When a kid’s wish list for their birthday didn’t have things like Wii games and Ipods and Mp3 players. When a battery operated toy was a novelty. When kids were actually excited to get yo-yo’s and hula hoops and footballs and sets of army men and plastic army tanks. Oh and the sets with cowboys and indians. Probably don't make those anymore. Probably politically incorrect.
I was visiting with a friend at Church on Sunday. I was using my I phone as a calculator to tally up the Sunday School class numbers because the calculator wasn’t working and heaven forbid I actually have to use pen and paper! He said something about technology and not being able to function without his I-phone. I mentioned my fondness for google and how anything you need to know you can get an answer for with a few keystrokes. This particular friend teaches a Sunday School class comprised of young adults in the age range of about 24-30. He said that whenever he is teaching a lesson and mentions a scripture that instead of them looking in their Bibles to find the passage he references, they all type in and read the scripture from their i-phones and blackberrys.
And it made me sad. Because it’s simply not the same. I have some of my mom’s old Bibles and the notes she made in the margins and the passages she underlined and the pages that are worn from being turned to so much are all part of what makes that Bible so special to me. The front of one has a place where births and deaths and baptisms are recorded. All of that will be lost to the electronic generation. What will the children of those afore mentioned Bible on I phone adults have handed down to them.
I have a bunch of old letters that a friend and I wrote back and forth to each other when I was a kid. I have lots of greeting cards that I’ve received over the year that meant something to me that I have saved. I have sympathy cards from when my mother died, I have love notes from when I first met my son’s dad and we were young and in love and silly. I have diaries from when I was a kid all the way through high school. These are part of me; a road map of sorts of my life. Someday, when I die some grandchild will find this box in my belongings and wonder what these items are. Already, I get emails instead of letters, e cards instead of cards in the mail, and I don’t write in a diary, I blog on a computer. You can go online to the funeral home's website and leave a sympathy note instead of sending a card.
A whole generation will grow up and not have a memory box like the one I mention. There won’t be boxes of old photos to sift through because they are all electronically stored on a computer or a disk or still in the camera phone.
Call me old fashioned, but some things just need to stay the same.
That being said you would have to pry my I-phone out of my cold dead hands to get me to give it up!
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