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| This is a picture of the 4 generations in my family. It was taken in 1999. |
When I think back on conversations I’ve had with my 97 year old Grandmother, I marvel at the changes she has seen in her lifetime. She was born in 1913 in South Africa, which will make her 98 in a few short months. I love hearing stories of her family’s immigration from South Africa to Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia. They travelled the distance via steam locomotive. The train engineer used coal to stoke the furnaces and power the train. I marvel at her recollections of travelling to school as a young girl by ox and cart, on unpaved dirt roads. At the end of the day as darkness approached, they would place candles in glass jars and hang them on the ox carts to light their way. There was no phone service. TV had not been invented yet, and certainly there was no technology in place as we know it today.
Moving up a generation, I spoke with my parents about growing up in their era. Their family shared a telephone “party-line” with several other families. The mining community they lived in was too far out of range for each home to be hooked up to the phone system. This meant they shared one line and each line had a distinctive ring; like two short and two long rings to let the families know which call was theirs. They did have electricity and running water. However, the water had to be heated up in large outside drums. These were built up on bricks with fires lit underneath to heat the water which was then channeled inside by pipes. Much to my children’s horror, their grandparents had outside toilets which were called “long drops”, or otherwise known to Americans as outhouses. Memories were shared of low-level bridges which were flooded during the rainy season, making crossings impossible. When my Mother moved into town they did have telephones, electricity and hot, running water as well as flush toilets. There was only one cinema in town, and wind-up gramophones with 8 inch records were popular at that time.
As for my own generation, we’ve seen some incredible changes in technology too. As a “tween” I was the proud owner of an electric record player, one step up from my own mother! This played the old vinyl L.P.’s. My siblings and I later on were delighted to own our own Walkman’s which played tape cassettes. I recall going to night school to learn how to type on a manual type writer. Every error was painstakingly “whited out”, or erased with an ink eraser until a hole appeared in the paper. This forced the poor typist to start all over. I recall my very first job at a print shop. I pasted up an entire book or two, page by painstaking page. Every single “tick mark” for the borders had to be carefully drawn in. Each cursed correction or addition had to be pasted over the original, line by line. Yes, computers were in use, but they were early versions of what they are today. Personal computers were finally introduced to most homes. Our kids today laugh at the technology of our time. It makes me feel like a dinosaur from a time long ago. It’s amazing to think that the most changes we have seen in technology have only occurred in the past 20 years. For me the most precious addition is the introduction of personal GPS systems. Not only are they portable, but I no longer have to fight with the pages of a map book. Nor do I have to print out directions from MapQuest, which was the next step forward in progress. Now we just plug in the address we are driving to, and lo and behold a voice directs you every step of the way, along with a visual map that changes as you drive. I love this little piece of technology. It is a blessing to those of us who are directionally challenged!
Last but not least, the generation of now, my children’s’ era, are privileged. They get the chance to own items like iPods, laptop computers, cell phones with internet access, 3D flat screen or widescreen TV’s. These TV’s have evolved to a whole new level. They can be transformed into total entertainment centers with the purchase of a dazzling array of extras. These can include things like Wii, X-box, or Play station. Interactive games like Wii can come with stand on surf boards, simulated guns to shoot moving targets and more than I even know about! My grandmother has been left way behind the times with the advances in technology. It’s more confusing to try and explain to her how things work than what they are! Granted, technology will always develop at a rapid rate. The trick is to keep up with technology and it’s offshoot of products. If you can’t afford to buy them, do some on-line research. This way someone from my parents or my generation can converse with my children’s generation. We can at least understand the world we occupy together. It was fun digging up old memories and touching on generational roots and long forgotten habits. The joy my family received in rehashing history made me realize just how far we have come, and how technology has shaped the very fabric of our lives.
