Technology is nifty — don’t get me wrong. Without technology, I wouldn’t be able to play Bubble Burst on my Droid while pretending to listen to my boss babble on about news that happened last week. Pursing one’s lips and furrowing one’s brow once in a while is a great help in this.
Every once in a while, though, I pause and think about all those things that are gone — distinct experiences that used to be shared by waves of teenagers, that just won’t anymore. Generation Xers, we are both the last — and the first.
Remember this shit?
Realizing, as you’re standing next to the television, awkwardly holding the antenna in such a way as to catch the signal for the Red Sox vs. Yankees game, that your father only had children for this very purpose.
This realization becomes clearer after the game when you’re called back to change channels. This was in the pre-cable era.
Yard work. My three siblings and I would be sent out into the yard, knees buckling under the weight of shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, in the boiling 120 degree Massachusetts heat, to follow my father around as he pushed about his electric law mower and cut the grass. He would, of course, eventually run over the cord, launching a rainbow of curses not usually heard outside in our suburban neighborhood. Eventually he broke down and bought a gasoline-powered mower. My brother got the honor of using the mower when Dad got sick of it, freeing him from rake duty, which totally sucked because just pushing a power around didn’t give him a handful of blisters and and a body covered with sunburn. But he had a penis, you see, so he was special. This was in the pre-ride-on mower era.
Back in day, when we were assigned reports on various subjects, we actually had to write them out by hand, and not cut and paste giant chunks of them from Wikipedia. This was in the pre-Internet era.
Many children of the Generation X era spent much of our time struggling to breathe while our parents and and grandparents and assorted relatives lit up cigarettes galore and drank like fish while laughing as creepy uncles told their elementary school nieces they were certain to grow up to be ‘real lookers’. This was in the we know smoking is bad but we don’t care era and pre-ped-o-bear era.
Parents announcing that this family is, indeed, going on a goddamn trip to the goddamn lake and we are all going to goddamn enjoy it because it’s a vacation for the parents, too, not just you damn kids. So we all get get into the Dodge whatever sedan, which only has three seat belts in the back but has four kids crammed into it, and no air conditioning. And if any one of you pisses off your father your mother has announced she will kill you. Dad chain smokes for the entire three hour drive, and Christ forbid you ask to stop to pee. To this day, I consider it a great luxury to actually stop at a rest area to urinate. This was in the pre-SUV era.
Then again, maybe we shouldn’t mourn.
