The Way We Were

When I was a kid, my family took a trip to Kentucky to visit relatives and see where my mother had grown up. It was like taking a trip back through time, there were so many things my sisters and I had never seen or experienced. We saw our first well and drank the water from it, ice cold even in summer, with a vague taste of machine oil; we traveled by car from the farmhouse where my mother was born and raised to the schoolhouse where she commuted daily, discovering that it really did have only one room and it really was three miles away; we puzzled over the grindstone in her front yard until our mother told us that it was for sharpening tools and knives.

My father was thrilled with the grindstone. He insisted on a posed photograph with it, to give to his boss. I still have a copy of this somewhere: my father is bending over the grindstone, with his nose just touching it. On vacation, but I've still got my nose to the grindstone, he wrote on the back of the original.

My mother kept shaking her head at everything. "Imagine this being an antique," she said, holding up a washboard. "Imagine anyone not knowing what a grindstone was for."

Late last month, my husband's 96-year-old aunt died. As we went through boxes of her old things, I had a surreal flashback. But this time, I wasn't getting a glimpse of a world I'd never seen, I was traveling back in time to a place where I'd once lived. "This'll need a new battery," I said, picking up a watch and holding it to my ear.

My husband took it from me and frowned. "It just needs to be wound," he said.

Of course that was all it needed -- how had I forgotten? There once was a time when all watches were analog, not digital. And they didn't need batteries.

On the way back to Scotland, I made a list of all the things I can remember which are now as outdated as the grindstone in my mother's yard was when I was young. Here it is, for the benefit of the new generation, including my kids:

Mechanical pencil sharpeners -- You stuck your pencil in these and actually had to rotate the handle yourself. Imagine the toil!

Black and white televisions -- I can even remember these when the screen was about four inches square and the cabinets were huge and bulky. And yet, in our primitive daftness, we still thought they were incredible.

Stationery -- This came in boxes with clear plastic lids and twee little ribbons. There were thousands of varieties, from plain stuff for men and floral nonsense for women. The stationery you chose reflected your personality. I veered between botanically correct floral designs to plain ruled notebook paper. I fancied myself an iconoclast even back then.

Twin tub washing machines -- In Japan, the Netherlands, and Wales, these were what I used, and they were all plumbed for cold water only. You pulled your clothes out of one tub, sopping wet, and plugged them into the other, then pressed the 'spin' button -- and hoped for the best. The one my husband and I had in Wales was a hellish, lethal thing that leaked soapy water and oil. Twin tub washing machines may have been inconvenient, but they absolutely developed character.

Milk in bottles, milk deliveries -- Milk used to be one of the few things somebody would deliver to your house. It came in bottles, in a little metal caddy. As soon as you heard the tinkle of bottles on the porch, you had to get out there fast to take it in -- at least you did in Southern California. When I left home in the seventies, they'd stopped delivering milk door to door. When my husband and I moved to Wales, in the early nineties, I learned to my delight that they were 20 years behind the times. In Wales, you could leave your milk out all day if you didn't mind being known as a lazy slob. Sometimes it actually froze out there.

Reel-to-reel tapes -- Imagine cassette tapes (amazingly outdated themselves) without the cassettes. Imagine if the tape inside them was wound onto two separate spools and always in danger of tangling, snagging and getting generally messed up. Imagine these tapes existing in a house filled with cats. Ah, those were the days.

Manual typewriters -- I learned to type on these. You had to whack down HARD with your fingers, which usually resulted in traumatic arthritis a few decades later, but there were advantages too: when you wanted to emphasize something, you just used more physical force. There was a direct, visceral link between your emotional state and the text you produced. I love my laptop, but I adored my old 1933 Frankfurt-au-Main Torpedo.

So much in our lives has changed, I could go on and on. I still haven't covered record players, iceboxes, stoves you had to light, shoes with strings that had to be tied, cloth diapers, cloth napkins that had to be ironed, or cars. But I'll finish here, with these questions: What out-of-date things do you remember? And what are we using now that you think will be passé within the next few decades?

Some day, maybe I'll see that look on my kids' faces. Maybe I'll see them shake their heads and say in wondering tones: Imagine this being an antique! Imagine anyone not knowing what this is for!

That would be so cool.