"Memories", an essay by my friend Henry.
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My aunt just had her 95th birthday. The time of her youth seems almost unimaginably distant, and very soon our window on most of the first half of the last century will close.
When I was a kid, there was a cooler outside of the gas station that contained several different kinds of sodas. Glass bottles sat in wooden boxes in the cooler. At the top on the left was a tin box that contained some small change. This was what other people had paid for sodas they took out. There was a padlock on the outside of the cooler,a relic of Sunday Blue Laws, but it was broken.
This is how stuff was done then. I'm not 205 years old, nor am I from Mars, but the place I grew up in sometimes seems to be as different and remote as that. It always makes me think of Buckminster Fuller's comment that the elderly are time travelers we are privileged to have among us. When he was talking about this, people who had traveled across the plains of America in covered wagons were watching the first men sent into space.
I had a very interesting talk with a plant-care (takes care of plants) person when I went for an interview at Adobe several years ago. I was then working for Safeco Insurance - located in a landmark high-rise tower in North Seattle. This plant-care person took care of the plants in the Safeco building when it was new. She described places and departments I thought I knew pretty well, but her recollections were so different. She remembered the place when it was full of the ding and clatter of typewriters. She remembered the teletype rooms, and the rows of telephone operators they used to have. At that time there was "The Computer" - located somewhere else and accessed through big black and white flickering terminals.
We laughed about mimeograph machines we'd used and fought with - the "football" machine that was used to make transparencies for overhead projectors. I'd just never thought of how my current modern workplace had been transformed by the computer revolution.
My father and I attended the same summer camp when we were boys. It's gone now, so my own children can't go there - they wouldn't want to go anyway, as there was no television nor video games. I probably spent as much time playing on the trampoline when I was 14 as my 14 year old son spends playing Warcraft. It will make us into different people. I wonder how much of my world he will understand when he is fifty.
When my mother was 8, her family moved from Colorado to Oregon. They drove there in a Model-T. After they got to California and crossed the desert, she remembers that they entered a region of orange groves - mile after mile. Never the confident navigator, my grandfather stopped at a little store in the midst of the endless groves of fragrant oranges to ask directions. "No problem," said the proprietor, "you'll know you're getting close into Los Angeles when the smell of the orange blossoms mixes with the smell of the ocean." Fifty years later, when I first came to LA, the place was utterly different. Fifty years from now, by current scientific opinion, much of LA will be under water and the coast will begin where my grandfather stopped to ask directions.
Things change and I regret that I know so few older people. I'd like to sample their recollections and pass on their memories to another generation of time travelers.
