Generation Gaps

My daughter sits, curled up on the sofa, giggling her head off. She is reading Terry Pratchett, one of her favorite authors. From time to time, she reads parts out loud to us, but she can hardly pronounce the words for laughing.

All I can do is stare at her in wonder. I was a somber, graceless, awkward teenager, and pretentious too. When I was fifteen, Dostoevsky was my favorite writer. When anyone asked me what books I liked, I always gave them a long, harsh dose of Raskolnikov and Prince Myshkin. I look at my funny, engaging daughter and wonder how I ended up with a kid like her.

My daughter's entire life is so different from mine. My mother used to say this about her life and mine too. She grew up in a house without running water or electricity and used to tell us stories of walking miles to school in the snow, pumping water from a well, having to make her own clothes. It always amazed us to imagine growing up without telephones, radios, televisions, cars, shopping malls, or dentists. When I compare my life with my mother's, it's almost as though we grew up in different countries. But when I compare my life to my daughter's, I'm amazed at all the differences. Here are just a few ways her life is completely different from what mine was at her age:

Telephones

I can hardly imagine what it would have been like at age fifteen to be able to contact my friends on my very own mobile telephone, to have the privacy to discuss anything with what few friends I had. Our telephone -- and we only had one -- was tethered to the kitchen wall, barely a foot from my father's favorite armchair. Unless I managed to call my friends when my father wasn't at home, he heard everything I said. In fact, it wasn't that he just happened to overhear my side of the conversation, he actively listened and would frequently make comments to my desperately muttered exchanges. The stereotypical image of a teenage girl sprawled on pink chenille, yakking away to her friends for hours in the privacy of her bedroom couldn't have been less in keeping with my personal reality.

My daughter can talk to her friends whenever she likes. She can talk in her bedroom, in the car, walking down the stairs, strolling down the street, even sitting in a dolmus. If we're around and she wants privacy, all she has to do is text.

Computers

When I was growing up, nobody had them. I learned how to type on an Underwood with a sticky A key. You had to bear down hard (being cheapskates, we used the ribbon until the very last smudge of ink was gone) and when you made a mistake, you either scored over it and retyped, or, if your parents were prepared to fork out for it, used expensive correction fluid. (Guess which one applied to us?) If I wanted to get in touch with someone in another town, the phone was off limits; parents who won't pay for correction fluid absolutely won't pay for long distance phone calls.

My daughter can actually write pen-and-paper letters: we've taught her. She knows you have to fold them up, insert them into envelopes, address the envelopes and affix a postage stamp (she knows which corner you paste it on too); she knows it goes into a special metal receptacle called a postbox. But she's gone through this cumbersome, old-fashioned process half a dozen times in her life, because she has computers.

As I write this, my daughter is Facebook-chatting with two friends in Scotland. Sometimes she 'chats' with them on MSN; even in the method of at-your-fingertips effortless communication, she has several choices.

Photography

I inherited my mother's old Brownie camera, a large, clumsy-looking thing with a strap that went around my neck. You stood ten feet away from whatever you wanted to photograph, flipped open the lid, fixed the object in the tiny window, and pressed a button. Then, days, weeks, even months later, when the roll of film was finished, you carefully wound up the last bit of film, put the roll in an envelope, and took it to be developed. Then you waited breathlessly for up to a week (life in the sixties was all about deferred gratification) until you got a call from the drugstore telling you that your pictures were ready. Full of anticipation, you picked up the envelope with your shiny, black-and-white images (color was for rich people) -- and perhaps found that only three pictures had come out. When my father took real pictures of us, he fooled around with things like focus, flashbulbs, and F-stops and swore a lot under his breath while we fidgeted.

My daughter takes dozens of photographs on either her mobile phone or our digital camera (once again, she has choices). Virtually all of the pictures come out perfectly, they are all in stunning color, and she can see them instantly. Moreover, she can share them with her sisters and friends in Scotland, with people in Japan, Turkey, America -- anywhere. In seconds, she can copy someone else's photo onto her phone and post it on her Facebook account.

Church

When I was very young, we went three times a week and were strongly discouraged from missing worship. We went on Wednesday night, Sunday morning, and Sunday evening. If I had back all the time I spent listening to scary hellfire and damnation sermons, I'd be able to write a couple of books. But I'd be a completely different person. After the age of eight, we changed religions and only went once a week. But not going wasn't an option.

My daughter doesn't go to church for many reasons. But she grew up almost next door to a Buddhist temple. And if she wanted to go to a mosque, she'd be spoiled for a choice: there are at least three within easy walking distance from our house.

Languages

At the age of fifteen, I yearned with all my heart to learn a foreign language that wasn't French. I really did not enjoy French. I wanted to learn Russian, Japanese, or Hebrew -- anything with a writing system I could not understand. Someone gave us a pile of old Japanese magazines once when I was ten and I spent ages poring over them, trying to copy out the symbols, desperate to crack the code.

Japanese was my daughter's first language. Until she was seven, she spoke it as well as she did English and was ahead of her peers in reading it. She can still speak it, albeit haltingly, and she reads it fairly well. She has made more progress than I have in Turkish and she is currently teaching herself Korean. She can do this on the internet; tutorials on Hangeul, the Korean symbols used to make up sounds, can be downloaded from the internet.

Some years back we went to Kentucky, to the farm where my mother grew up with all her sisters and brothers. The old house had burned down, but the grindstone where they used to sharpen their tools was still standing, as was the old well. We walked through the tiny graveyard where my grandparents are buried and I tried to picture them and what they might have thought of me and my Japanese-speaking non-church-going millenium girls who had grown up half the way around the world. We left eucalyptus leaves and origami flowers on their graves and I told my girls about their difficult lives, the hardships they'd gone through, the things they had accomplished.

Then we got into our rental car and drove away.