- Share This Post
- 0
- submit
- 3
-
Sparkle (0)
photo credit: Slack pics
Kids. They have no idea how good they have it. Oh God, did I really just type that? The minute I committed those words to my screen I became an old person. I might as well pull out my rocker, sit on my porch and wag my finger at the young’uns driving down the road with the pulse of their crazy rap music shaking my bones. I’m really not old. Really – 21 twice over, that’s all. Unfortunately, I am old enough, however, to know that kids today are spoiled.
You won’t hear me telling tales about how I had to walk 10 miles uphill…in the snow…with no shoes. But you will hear me talk about having to ride 10 miles in a silver Gremlin with a faulty 8-track player in Savannah heat with no air. The Gremlin that doubled as my dad’s tool shed. I mean can you even imagine the discomfort I had to endure? And I’m just talking about the four-wheeled Home Depot special.
So let me take this a bit further and prove my point with 5 things that I didn’t have the luxury of when I was a kid.
1. Cell Phones – When I was a kid, I carried a dime (yep, a dime) just in case I needed to make a phone call when my parents dropped me off at the mall with my $5 allowance. God forbid, the phone took my Roosevelt or I talked over the allotted time. If that happened I was screwed. I might dig through the coin return of every phone hoping to get lucky. Or I might have to go into a store and ask if I could use their phone to call home. There were no cell phones.
Thanks to a very generous grandfather, my 12 year old has an iPhone. Because he needs one. Because you never know when you might need to play Chopsticks on a Fart Piano app, or use your location services to locate the nearest – nearest what? The iPhone has everything you need – there is no need to locate anything – especially when you’re 12. And since he’s rarely even 50ft. away from us, he certainly doesn’t need to call us. Of course that doesn’t stop him from calling me when he’s downstairs to ask if I can bring him a snack. WTF? Isn’t there an app for that yet?
2. Drivin’ Movies – When I was a kid, the only movie in my car was the drama that played out between me and my brother on long trips. We didn’t have movies in the car! Hell, we were lucky if the radio worked. But if it did work it usually meant listening to Tammy “Whine”ette or Barbara Mandrell singing about crackers in her bed. I couldn’t put in my headphones and crank up my iPod so I could listen to Donny Osmond or Leif Garrett. Nope. My entertainment was usually in the form of Nancy Drew mysteries, or Fun Pads, or those cool booklets that came with puzzles and games whose answers were revealed with a mystery marker. When all else failed I would stare out the window and see how many different license plates I could see. I suggested that to my kids once and they looked at me as if I had sprouted horns (although they know those only come out once a year!).
No, my kids are spoiled. Instead of needing to agree on a radio station, they need to agree on whether or not to watch Nemo or Bill Nye. And yet on long trips I still get to hear I’m bored. Un-be-lieve-a-ble!
3. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network – When I was a kid we didn’t have TV channels dedicated to us. There were no kid channels that showed cartoons all day. We had to be satisfied with Little House on the Prairie and Andy Griffith reruns after school and wait until Saturday morning to get our fill of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. And the scary thing is I actually liked Ma and Pa on the prairie. I even looked forward to Barney Fife and his antics. Scrar-reee!
Now the kids have as many channels to choose from as the adults. No matter the time of day you can find
