A time when our old home was the best and safest place to be

When candy was 1 penny or bubblegum three for 5 cents

When the skies seemed bluer

When drinking tap water was the only water available to us

When we all sat at the dinner table together for a meal

When we could walk to school and felt safe doing so

When we used to visit family on weekends and did not have to call or ‘schedule’ a time to visit. Everyone just showed up.

When Sundays where special and lunches were always a tomato sauce pasta with meatballs and a salad

When 8 tracks used to always fall from the front seat because there were so many

When a stick shift used to be part of the steering column

Apple ... Google ... AOL ... Who?  What? No clue ...

Hot summer nights sleeping by the window to feel the breeze blowing through

When Lawrence Welk was only viewed in black and white

Alf!

When faxes were sent on thermal paper

When meetings were mostly done in person

When we used to talk to each other and have long conversation

When cell phones were the size of bricks

When saying I felt gay meant I was really happy

When the mail was the only option

When milk used to be sold in glass bottles and sometime delivered to our home

When diapers used to be made of cloth

When no one knew what FaceBook, Google, Yahoo were.

When “you’ve got mail” meant you were one of the few with an AOL email account

When watching a movie in VHS format was cool and Beta (Betamax) was radically different

The Bay City Rollers

The class bully David Turnbull

Getting caught skipping classes

When we used to carry a pager and had to use a pay phone to respond

Going to a barber shop and getting ugly buzz cuts (when I used to have hair)

Grocery stores and shopping malls were all closed on Sundays and all Holidays

Sending a telegram … forgot about that one.

Its funny how memories work. I have so many as we all do and one always leads to another and another and they always seem to go along with a story. It almost felt like life was simpler, easier.   No one really worried about things that are so common today. We were sheltered to some degree because the news always took time to get to us and it wasn't as live and as vivid as it is today. Home made movies were on 8 MM or Super 8 and they had to be developed like photos and they always took a week or longer. Everything was slower but we accepted it and were perfectly fine with it.

We’ve been conditioned to accept communications that are instant. Purchases that happen in real time. News with graphic reports are the norm. Maybe forest fires that ate up thousands of acres, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes happened all the time with the same frequency as today and just because we get more detailed accounts of these events, we feel as though the world has changed. Things are bad. Perception perhaps? Maybe …

I like my memories. I find myself often sailing off into some past memory and getting lost in it for a while. But I always return. That's life. So how do these memories compare to the ones created today? Hmmm … that's another blog. Stay tuned.