Trip Down Memory Lane

As Bean was going to sleep tonight, he asked me if we had had ice boxes instead of refrigerators when I was a kid. "No," I told him. "Grandpa had ice boxes, but we had refrigerators." "Did you have electricity?" he wanted to know. "Yes, we had electricity," I said. "You know, Bean, when Grandpa was a kid it was very, very different than when I was a kid. They didn't have television, they had ice boxes, they didn't have the same kinds of heat in their houses that we do. But when I was a kid, it really wasn't very different from the way it is now. We had television - ours was black and white, but there were color televisions then. We had telephones, but they were rotary dial phones" ("I know!" he said - "that is a very popular style for toy phones!"). "We had record players, not cds or mp3 players, and we didn't have computers."

"WHAT?!" he exclaimed. "No computers? How did you send email?"

"We didn't," I said. "We called people on the phone, and we wrote letters. If someone wasn't home, we called back later. Most people didn't have answering machines."

"How did you skype?!" he asked, floored that there was ever a time without instant and constant communication.

I didn't have the heart to tell him yet about Pong.