48

Another year, another birthday.  Forty eight this time.  Thanks for all the well wishes.  It's very appreciated.

Having kids who are 15, 12 and 9, I often get asked to explain what the good old days of my youth were like.  Looking back helps me understand the life of my ancestors; my parents, grandparents and so on.  My father grew up in the age of an ever shrinking globe.  He was born in 1929, and is still alive today, having witnessed the conquering of air travel, making distances which were year long journeys into a series of flights over two days.  The moon was something unattainable in the sky when he was a kid.  Today we've actually seen close up pictures of Pluto.  Distance grew smaller in his life.

His mother, my grandmother, witnessed the beginning of a northern Minnesota frontier; a wild and alien place when she was born there, it became a tamed wilderness by the time she died at 103.  She was born as Roosevelt was finishing out McKinley's second term.  She didn't make it to Obama's victory, but she saw the first African American man to be President actually campaigning.  She saw the first cars rolling off the assembly lines, watching them move from luxury item to mandatory family need.  She saw the Great Depression and was the first generation to live in the time of options, something her parents never really dreamed of.

When I look back on my life, obviously computers are the biggie.  When I was a kid, computers still hadn't infiltrated the workplace.  I remember my father having a job, something like "regional sales manager for applied products, midwest division," which begged to be downsized when computers started to get rolling.  I remember the first wave of computers sending a lot of people to the unemployment office in the late 70's/early 80's.  I remember floppy disks, and really crappy computer games, which seemed so cutting edge when they were introduced.  I remember the main use of my first computer being to write letters I would still mail to my friends, feeling guilty because printing off pages was too impersonal.  I remember the continued march forward in technology.

I've gotten quite a few birthday greetings via Facebook and Twitter.  It is by far the most common method of wishing me a happy birthday this year.  Ten years ago, as hard as this is to comprehend, it was mainly e-mail messages.  Ten years before that, 1996, was the first year I had an e-mail address. Only two or three people I knew had one, so most of my birthday well wishes came either in the mail, in person or over the phone.

I remember evening newspapers, and my father demanding we all be quiet as he watched the evening news.  I remember timing my phone calls to keep the cost down.  I remember preparing my show for three hours (for a three hour radio show) by ensuring I was at a library with enough time to either make notes, or pay the pricy copier costs of five cents per copy.  I remember my parents refusing to drive me to my best friends house five miles away, because he was "too far away for a best friend."  Today, some of my kid's more regular friends live 20 miles away.

I remember the freedom we all felt with cassette tapes.  I remember CD's being incredible when they were introduced, such a cleaner sound, but you couldn't record on them, so cassettes still dominated.  Eventually came recordable CD's and then MP3.  I can't remember the last full album I purchased.  I wonder what to do with the large box of CD's I have in the garage, as my next computer probably won't even be able to play the antiquated technology.

I remember watching something on TV I didn't like, or had seen twenty times before,  because the other four channels had nothing on I cared for.  I remember the original cable television, with 12 channels; The Weather Channel, ESPN with Australian rules football, MTV with wall to wall music, and CNN.  What was I going to do with all of these viewing options?  Today I have 150 channels I never watch.

I remember the joy of getting a letter in the mail, a brief update from a friend far away.  I remember sitting with friends and talking without glowing rectangles always at arms reach.

I remember my mother planning out meals, with meats defrosting days before they were to be cooked.  I remember the microwaves first coming into our house, and how awful the food out of them tasted.  Today, many people consider warming up a microwave meal 'home cooking.'

I remember gas stations being only where you got gas, and automotive supplies.  Slowly they added candy and soda, and now each one is a mini grocery store, many of them better stocked than some of the grocery stores of my youth.

I remember phones which were attached to the wall, and how the first wireless phones were only good for about 20 feet around the base, but you still felt so free!

I remember smokers EVERYWHERE!  I remember smokers getting angry if a restaurant had non-smoking seating, sitting next to non-smokers, blowing smoke in their direction.  Most of those people are probably long dead.

I could go on and on, but my kids mock me enough as it is.  I don't want to dwell in the past.  Just remember it.  Remember what you can, tell it to someone, and maybe it'll help them evaluate what they need to remember, as the world they grow up in disappears right before their eyes.