Worldview of an Eighty-Year-Old Woman

¶ … Worldview of an Eighty-year-Old Woman I Met

Busy -- but with little to do. Lazy. Disposable. All of these were the adjectives I heard an eighty-year-old woman use to describe our modern culture. She lived in an era where most families had one car. Children and parents often lived together in one large home, out of economic necessity. Mothers did work, contrary to popular mythology, but the grandmothers would watch the children at home, or the older children would watch the younger children, rather than rushing off to soccer practice, cruising to Starbucks in their own shiny cars, or retreating to their rooms to play video games.

Children played back then, in a disorganized fashion. Baseball, bike riding, and jump rope, from the time they got home from school to when they had to go home to dinner at dusk. No one was lost. Everyone knew where everyone lived, and the daily routines of the neighbors. With fewer cars, dogs roamed the streets, rather than being enclosed in invisible fences like today. On her large, sprawling property the woman had owned several Great Danes.

Going shopping was an event, not a daily occurrence. Going out to eat was a rare treat. There were no franchises. Things tasted different, in different parts of the country, and food seemed to taste better, more wholesome, as if you could smell the farm on the surface of butter and in the eggs or wafting from the glass containers of milk. People baked from scratch, not from boxes. They had to, just to afford to live.

People did not take new things for granted. Most children wore hand-me-downs and shoe shopping for the new school year was an event. Mothers darned socks and mended holes rather than purchased new clothes.

If a child had a problem with a teacher, the parent's first instinct was not to run to the school to complain, but to tell the child to respect authority. Parents assumed that they would be obeyed, by and large.

She could still remember when she was a child how the iceman would come, and give a great block of ice to her family, to keep the food cold. How hard it was to scrub a floor with elbow grease, how it was her chore as a child to wash the dishes and help her mother hang out the laundry with clothespins. Do children still have chores, she wondered? Her children had a maid service that came in to their homes, more often than not, to take care of such basic, seemingly trivial duties. They had well-stocked refrigerators and pantries with great boxes bought from Costco and new and shiny appliances.

Today, parents and children are seldom at home together. They are usually working and ferrying their children off to various afterschool activities like soccer and gymnastics. Children are not supposed to play in the streets, or walk to school. Dinner is takeout, often eaten on the run in the back of a large SUV. She didn't understand how people could have so many more modern conveniences to make life easier, yet constantly say that they were stressed out and had no time, not even to sit down to dinner occasionally.

Ah yes, dinner. Sunday dinner used to be a sacred event. The whole family would gather, often dressed particularly nicely, and have a real 'family style meal.' Now when people got together, it was usually only on holidays, it was such a rare event. And the children would get bored quickly and wander to a room to watch television -- if their parents hadn't gotten to the TV first! Heaven forbid people would have to talk to one another!