Changes

Tonight at bed I told Relia a story.  She always wants to hear stories from when I was young.  That's tricky, because the stuff I remember most is when I was getting into trouble and . . . I don't really want to share that with her.  Tonight I told her about how my house was different when I was her age. 

• We only had five channels.  She doesn't really understand numbers so she doesn't know quite how much of a difference this is.
• We had encyclopedias but no computers.  (She said "oh no!" when I told her this.)
• Our cameras had rolls of film.  You could only take that many and then you had to take that into a store and have them develop the film.  I forgot to tell her that we couldn't even see the picture until we got it back. 
• Calling someone on the phone long distance was expensive.  Now it's no big deal.  We would write letters to other people.
• In order to change the channel we would actually get up and walk over to the TV.  (She laughed at this.)
• Then she asked if we even had Tivo.  I told her no, we had to watch commercials.  We couldn't fast forward or rewind.  We couldn't pause it.  If a show was on and we weren't home we missed it entirely.
• The only way we could watch a movie on the TV is if it happened to be shown on one of the five channels that we got.  We had no DVD or VCR.  Certainly no Apple TV.  (This seemed to rock her world a bit.)
• Finally, I told her that we didn't have a microwave.  To heat something up we had to use the oven or the stove.  She told me that sounded awful.

After this conversation, I resolved that we would read through some of the 'Little House' books at some point.  It's easy to forget just how much things have changed and how quickly those changes have taken place.